A book that proclaims itself as astonishing in scale, brilliant in content and laugh-out-loud funny makes bold claims for itself. These are the claims on the back cover of Neville Lake's book ‘The Greatest Planet in the Universe’. Unfortunately, the contents do not live up to these grand ambitions.

Neville Lake is an Australian author with a 25-year career as a management and strategic consultant. He has used the book to bring together the business wisdom he has seen in hundreds of organisations and to identify more than 200 teaching points and “powerful rules” to help his readers succeed in business.

What makes Lake’s book different is that he reveals all through the genre of a science fiction novel instead of the conventional case study approach of most business books.

The year is 2460 and young zoo keeper Marcus Maximus is sent on an intergalactic journey to find the secrets of business and organisational success that can be applied to a new colony planet. A cosmic Grand Council has set Marcus a punishing deadline to come up with the goods, but fortunately the young truth-seeker teams up with a quizzical Star Wars-type character called Grand Alf. When he is not eating, drinking or sleeping – which he does an awful lot of – Alf introduces Marcus to prominent business people and administrators and helps the hero to distil their teachings into simple but meaningful principles.

The two shuttle around the universe gathering the secrets of the successful, which they finally present to the Grand Council. The Council, which has a menacing and dark reputation, sees the light of this gathered wisdom and appoints Marcus as the governor of their new planet. They do so with the tacit hope that he will build a better world.

The approach of setting a business book so far into an interplanetary future is novel. But the book’s teaching will probably be lost on people like me who like to see what it takes to succeed in the rough-and-tumble of the real world. Generally, we marketers are a hard-nosed lot and prefer to learn through our own and others’ hard-won experiences than through contrived fictitious situations.

The book is easy to read with touches of humour, but regretfully does not live up to its claim of being a page turner.

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