Other articles by Cecil Johnson:

Was Mozart a genius, or did he just practice really hard? 'New' management truths sometimes started as heresies Minorities get a stiff reminder that good is not good enough Economic competition between nations is fiercer 'Executricks' a guide to how to retire while still holding down that job Buffett, other business figures are profiled in splendid anthology 'Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business (Even If You've Never Played)' Markets often sense world shifts before so-called experts Success in business, like gambling, a matter of boosting luck Organizations can resemble 'tribes' in their shared values

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Some of the most successful business books are as good at predicting what will produce high performance for a business as "a pair of coconut headsets on a tropical island," asserts Phil Rosenzweig.

In his iconoclastic new book, "The Halo Effect," Rosenzweig, a professor at the International Institute for Management Development, portrays most authors who offer formulas for business success — and the leading business journalists and publications that feed off them — as purveyors of delusions.

Rosenzweig, who spent several years on the faculty of Harvard Business School and consults for prominent companies on organization and strategy, focuses his criticism on such icons of the genre as "In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies," by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman; "Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies," by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras; and "Good to Great," by Jim Collins.

Rosenzweig says those studies and most others of their ilk suffer from the halo effect.

"What leads to high performance? It's the mother of all business questions, a Wall Street equivalent of the Holy Grail," he writes. "Why does one company achieve great success, turning its shareholders into millionaires, while another company just muddles through, earning a modest profit but never catching fire or, even worse, failing altogether?"

The halo effect pervades most studies that try to answer that question, Rosenzweig says, because they use data from successful companies and attribute that success to things those companies and their executives and employees appear to have been doing.

Based upon a company's impressive financial performance, Rosenzweig explains, business journalists, researchers and authors look for and find evidence of that company's being strong in such attributes as leadership, integrity, customer focus, acquisitions integration, employee retention and recruiting, and technological adaptability.

But when such a company's performance slips, Rosenzweig points out, the halo effect operates in reverse, and the company is seen through the lenses of the business press as having been lacking in all or some of those attributes.

Rosenzweig assesses the business of trying to write prescriptions for high performance as pseudoscience. That's where the coconut earphones enter the picture.

The author borrows the phrase "Cargo Cult Science" from physicist Richard Feynman, who used it in referring to a cult of people in the South Pacific who sat and waited by makeshift runways lined with torches for the return of World War II-era cargo planes.

A controller would sit in a hut wearing coconut earphones with bamboo sticks protruding from them like antennas. Feynman says cargo cultists go through the form of what was done during the war, but no planes land, just as pseudoscientists go through the motions of true scientific inquiry but leave out the essentials.

"The business world is full of Cargo Cult Science, books and articles that claim to be rigorous scientific research but operate mainly at the level of storytelling," Rosenzweig writes.

"The Halo Effect" should be required reading for all business managers, academicians and journalists. It could go down as one of the most important business books of the decade. Of course, the primary thrust of this excellent business book is to caution readers to take all business books with several grains of salt.