The Sunday NYT op-ed feature by Dwight Garner on the enduring nature of animal-themed fiction and nonfiction may have been, as Jennifer Weiner quipped on her blog, “later than my period,” or maybe it would be more appropriately considered as the first iteration of a new Times theme: Yesterday’s business section included a story by Angel Jennings about how penguins gave new life to a management guide, as John P. Kotter‘s 1996 title Leading Change became 2006’s Our Iceberg Is Melting, which recasts the earlier book’s lessons on organizational change as a story about penguins banding together to find a new home with the help of an eight-step plan.
The numbers are impressive: Leading Change has sold a respectable million copies over the last decade; Iceberg has sold nearly a quarter-million (more, if the Times numbers came from Bookscan) in just ten months. The timing’s wrong for that to be a motivation for Portfolio‘s two “animal fable business books” coming later this year, but it certainly must make marketing director Will Weisser feel a bit more comfortable as their release dates approach. Still, that’s not a signal for everybody with an animal metaphor to start cranking out business advice: “It looks so deceptively simple, like anybody could have whipped up a fable, but it’s not,” Kotter cautions. “It has layers upon layers of knowledge.” Damn; there goes my proposal for Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying…