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For those who manage products with “brand” names, either consumer or B2B, it's a struggle to dilute manage‐ment theory and strategy lessons down to typical tasks faced day‐to‐day.

The business shelf today is dominated by two (not mutually exclusive) factors: Tom Peters and follow‐up editions of self‐dubbed classics. The Peters presence is all pervasive: It's in forwards, thanks (in general), employees‐as‐authors (thanks for the time off), and myriad other places. As a result, we rather think it dilutes the Peters name (or in Stack Attack lexicon, the Peters positioning): How can one management consultant hold to so many diverse (and mutually exclusive) theories?

If you've been reading too many business books that sound altogether too much like high school English essays, this Stack is for you. Three of the books are written with a terrific command of language and include at‐the‐ready examples from every sphere of life. The last book, a workbook, is intentionally simplified, but pragmatic and relentless in leading the horse—excuse me, the reader—to the water of action.

Sure, it's been a blow that so many of us have had to give up our arrogance of confusing a bull market with brains. This may be just the slap in the face we need to realize that no matter where we are with our companies, we can always improve them, always learn.

Some people are pushing the theory that the upcoming December 31st is the eve of the real millennium. Whether it's because of deeply held ideological beliefs, an obsession with calendars, or because they were too wrapped up with Y2K to really have a good time last year, who cares. Let's cut 'em some slack and toast to their right to their own point of view.

As Stack was finishing up this column, Merrill Lynch made the stunning announcement it will offer low‐priced, un‐brokered, on‐line trading by the end of the year (it had previously delivered limited on‐line access only to selected highest net worth clients).

Three of our Stack books unfortunately got caught in the time lag between being written and being published—in short, events overtook them. But not to worry. The worst that happens to them is they come across too idealistic about the Internet and the urgency of creative destruction, discontinuity, and change. The fourth book takes a page from Winston Churchill who said “The farther backward you look, the farther forward you can see,” and, although it went back all right, its authors seem to have got‐ten a little lost as they moved forward again.

Here in New York, we have a little Senate race going on. Even so, due to a strange convergence of events, most of the population, including Stack, have decided not to move to Iowa but to sit the campaign out, hoping the rhetoric blows over by apple‐picking season. Lately, we've been hearing a lot about what the two candidates are for. They tell us they are for children, for education, and for the future. As if anyone is actually against children et al. Stack had a similar reaction when facing this set of books. Customers? Who in business is against them?

As the dot‐coms crumble and the cash machines that funded them merge, suddenly all the urgency about finding and keeping the best people seems so … not urgent. That means you might not need to race out to buy the books in this Stack. All of them advocate working to change an entire organization to make it employee friendly—an “employer of choice” in the lingo—which now seems so … too much work. And as for the idea that companies exist for the workers, we think that went out with socialism.

Wouldn't Stack love to open a book and find a map of the new millennium. It doesn't have to be 100% right, but someone needs to take a stab at drawing one. We need a map, even if it's only a rough outline: Business boundaries are shifting, and the very definition of what it means to be a company is changing.