You, too, can be just like Tom Peters and Peter Drucker.

This is an excerpt from The Management Myth: Management Consulting Past, Present and Largely Bogus, published this month by W. W. Norton.

Among the most significant accomplishments of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution was the creation of what might loosely be called a free market in religion. In the first decades after the creation of the constitutional guarantees concerning the freedom of religion, the old monopolies—the previously established churches—shriveled, while new entrants—mostly the evangelical sects—captured 70 percent of the market. At the same time, the total market for religion expanded dramatically. The new breed of itinerant preachers who fanned out across the continent in effect conducted a grand experiment to test the varieties of religion that will sell in a democratic society. Forced to compete not just with each other but with alternative entertainments, such as whiskey and the theater, America's godfathers became pioneers in the techniques of mass marketing. Ultimately, many of them gravitated toward a particular formula that, with variations here and there, continues to serve as the most effective basis for disseminating a popular religion.

The industry that Tom Peters founded succeeded largely by sticking to the formula devised by America's pioneering preachers. In a sense, Peters brought management theory back home, by reuniting it with a much broader and deeper spiritual tradition that dates from the earliest days of the American republic. To be sure, the management theory before Peters had always had religion, but its religion was a hieratic one. It came down from a priesthood on high—from popelike figures such as Frederick Winslow Taylor and Elton Mayo. Peters' achievement was to transform the religion of management into a demotic one—a people's religion. Herewith, then, are the five easy steps to establishing a popular management religion.

1. We are all going to die! Starting with Excellence and continuing to his present seminars, Peters cannot find enough unnerving adjectives to describe the present time. He calls it "frightening," "dangerous," "disruptive," "crazy," "topsy-turvy," "uncertain," and "dire." In his first book, the immediate blame for the madness goes to the satanic Japanese, whose superior management skills have made life hell for American business. In later books and seminars, as it becomes clear that the Japanese are not going to be feasting on our babies after all, Peters spreads the blame more widely, citing globalization, technological innovation, a general increase in competitiveness, and the growing fickleness of consumers, especially the young. In the 1980s, the world is in "chaos"; the 1990s become "the nanosecond nineties"; and the 2000s, "the terabit twenties." "The only thing we can be certain about is uncertainty," Peters proclaims. As a matter of fact, one other thing that we can be certain about is that, whatever year it happens to be, Tom Peters will describe it as the scariest time of all.

We can also be certain that, in Tom Peters' world, the past is a different place. Twenty years ago—whenever that may be—life was calm, predictable, and even a little boring. For Peters, the paragon of this somnambulant past is his father's city gas company, where decade after decade the same people shuffled the same papers all day long.

For all gurus all the time, the story is the same. Every year is 1491 in America—to use the most vivid metaphor in Charles Handy's ample stockpile. We are perpetually suspended at a moment in time that divides a placid past from lots of pillaging and beheadings by some very aggressive foreigners. In 1994, Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad named the "inconstant environment" as the first challenge facing management. Thirteen years later, the same Hamel begins his newest book with an observation about "how little the practice of management has changed over the past several decades." But "sometime over the next decade," he warns, "your company will be challenged to change in a way for which it has no precedent."

Peter Drucker, who in this respect had the misfortune of being productive too long, is perhaps the most obdurate proponent of the view that there is no time as vexatious as the now. In the spring of 2001, Drucker insisted that we were "in the throes of a transition period." But according to his 1980 book, Managing in Turbulent Times, the age of turbulence is already upon us, and the era of "predictable times" is confined to "the 25 years between the Marshall Plan and the OPEC cartel" in 1973. In 1969, however, while the world presumably relaxed in this idyll of predictable times, this same Drucker argued in a book titled The Age of Discontinuity that the Age of Continuity has come to an end. Go back another decade into this Age of Continuity, to the flat-earth year of 1959, and Drucker was writing, "At some time during the last 20 years [1939-59], we imperceptibly moved out of the Modern Age and into a new, as yet nameless era."

The gurus' obsession with the instability of the present is to some extent the expression of a timeless insight about what it is like to live in a dynamic, capitalist economy. In the first decades of the 20^th century, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter described in vivid language the "gales of creative destruction" that regularly topple the old order and reward innovation in a market economy. In 1848, Karl Marx famously wrote that, under capitalism, "All fixed, fast-frozen relations ... are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned."

That life in a capitalist economy involves constant change can hardly be denied. But are the gurus right that the present time is so much more unstable than the past? By many measures, economic life in the developed world is actually less "turbulent" than it ever has been. In the United States, the volatility of GDP growth decreased from 3 percent in the period 1946-68 to 1.2 percent in the period 1985-2006; the volatility of inflation decreased from 3.2 percent to 0.6 percent over the same two periods; and the volatility of corporate profit growth decreased from 16.7 percent to 12.8 percent. The economic perturbations of the last half-century are like a summer day's surf compared with the tsunamis of the Great Depression and the periodic panics of the 19^th century. Technological change today can make heads spin with glee; but today's new technologies are hardly more destabilizing than the railroads, the automobile, the airplane, steamships, electricity, telephones, mass production, antibiotics, and radio were in their day. Globalization, too, is undoubtedly a force to be reckoned with; but the process has been going on for centuries, and in the grand scheme it may now be less disruptive than the creation of a continental market was in the United States in the late 19^th century.

To dispute the gurus on questions of fact, however, is a fool's game. When Peters and his fellow gurus contrast the innocent past with the present danger, they are not describing phenomena that can be observed in real time. They are invoking a certain emotional state of being. They are expressing our fear of change—and, ultimately, our fear of death. The pressure from which they seek refuge has its ultimate source not in managerial experience per se, nor even in a particular economic system, but in our own mortality. They are, in fact, taking the first step in the long-established formula for success in any democratic religion, which is to tie this fear of death and destruction to our particular time (whenever that may be) and so to link our existential anxieties with a claim about the peculiar wickedness of the age.

2. The bureaucracy is killing us! In Excellence, Peters and Waterman make clear that the greatest obstacle to our future happiness is to be found right here at home, in those glass-and-steel midtown office buildings. "The numerative, rationalist approach to management," the authors declare, "is right enough to be dangerously wrong, and it has arguably led us seriously astray." Their chief bogeyman is Frederick Winslow Taylor (though Max Weber, the German sociologist who made the mistake of pointing out the obvious truth that bureaucracy is a better form of administration than rule by tribal elders or charismatic dictators, often comes in for abuse too).

In Excellence, this critique of rationalism sounds a reasonable note. It might easily be mistaken for the musings of a pair of detached observers who wish to alert us to the many dysfunctionalities that inevitably beset large organizations as they tackle complex tasks or to the irrationality of rationalist number fetishists. In Peter's later work, however, the veneer of sanity melts before the underlying rage. "R-I-P. Rip, shred, tear, mutilate, destroy that hierarchy," he writes in Liberation Management—a book whose title consciously evokes liberation theology. In Re-imagine, his 2003 effort, he announces "an Unabashed Commitment to Destruction" and asserts that "a cool idea is by definition a Direct Frontal Attack on the Holy Authority of Today's Bosses."

As one follows Peters through the decades, it becomes clear that the assault on bureaucracy isn't a program but an expression of feeling. It isn't ultimately about changing things; it's about getting something off one's chest. The specific thing on the chest is the feeling that Nietzsche identifies as ressentiment—the resentment of the powerless before power. In 2003, while predicting for the umpteenth time the imminent "death of bureaucracy," Peters becomes mildly self-conscious of his own position: "I ... have been screaming and shouting about bankrupt business practices for 25 to 30 years ... mostly to no avail." He therefore begins every chapter in the book with a "rant." The rants don't accomplish much—as Peters says of his predecessor McGregor, "Everybody knew that what he said was true, and everybody continued to treat their workers like shit"—but they sure do make one feel better.

Peters' descent into ranting exposes a fundamental paradox concerning the audience for the guru literature. The guru business, in general, pretends to direct its grand pronouncements at the CEOs of the world. When the New York Times recently surveyed actual CEOs about their bedtime reading, however, it found that very few bothered to read the gurus. The dirty little secret of the business is that its audience is made up almost entirely of middle managers and wannabes. "You rarely found big company people there," says one of Peters' associates about the "Skunk Camp" workshops hosted by the Tom Peters Group. "It was middle managers from Domino's Pizzas and the like." "The average seminar participant I work with comes dressed in a drab suit, uses drab language-and noticeably quivers when I suggest that the most likely path to career salvation for the beleaguered and endangered middle manager is to try to get fired," says Peters, who understands that insulting his audience—within limits—is also a critical part of winning their trust.

3. There is good news in America! One of the fundamental principles of both democratic religion and the film business is the absolute necessity of a happy ending. To balance the fear of the present and the loathing of bureaucracy that he so ably invokes, Peters knows he must dispense an even greater dollop of hope. "We often view ourselves as victims of heartless organizations ... as hapless and helpless ‘cubicle slaves,' " he says. "We must remind ourselves that the White-Collar Revolution will erase all that. We must understand that in the New Economy all work is project work-and that every project must be a WOW (special) project." "Never underestimate the market for hope," adds fellow guru Gary Hamel. The back cover of Excellence screams with hope: "There is good news from America. There is an ART OF AMERICAN MANAGEMENT—and it works!"

But realizing the promise of the "White-Collar Revolution," Peters makes clear, is not just a matter of testing out a few new tips and tricks. True to his crypto-evangelical roots, he demands from his listeners a total conversion experience. "Turn your whole-damn-enterprise Upside Down-Right Now!" he shouts. There are no shades of gray in Peters' world. (Or brown—"Pity the poor brown," he says.) He makes an emphatic distinction between those who get it and those who don't, between the saved and the damned. "You'd have to be an outright fool not to see that we're in the midst of something big ... VERY BIG!" he says.

Though the other gurus may not always agree with Peters on exactly what this very big something is, all follow his lead in demanding total conversion to their favored doctrine. Indeed, in order to make their proposed solutions seem all the more valuable-and to ward off critics who might accuse them of peddling phony miracle cures—they invariably insist that the medicine will taste awful and be hard to swallow. Total transformation, they gravely inform us, is never easy.

Following the pattern established in evangelical and self-help narratives, the gurus' offer of salvation has three distinguishing features. The first is that it is always imminent. Judgment day is not tomorrow, perhaps, but the day after tomorrow—and in any case will not occur later than the decade after this one. The important point is that it is close enough for listeners to touch, but not so close that it can be confused with the wicked world of the present. The second is that it involves a social transformation that goes well beyond an increase in profits and productivity. "We are in the midst of redefining our basic ideas about what enterprise and organization and even being human is," Peters enthuses. The third is that it usually takes place-or at least gets its start-in that land of boundless promise: America.

4. "You have the power!" A listener approaches Peters after one of his presentations and says, "I can't implement any of this stuff. I don't have the power." Given that his sermons are nominally aimed at CEOs but land in the ears of middle managers of pizza delivery companies, this kind of disconnect must happen all the time in Peters' seminars. So how does Peters respond? "I flip out. This issue is different. It's up close and personal! It gets right to the core of how I've lived my life ever since I was a ‘powerless' junior officer in the Navy in 1966 ... ever since I was a ‘powerless' new-kid-on-the-block at McKinsey & Co. in 1974. In each case, I reveled in my powerlessness."

Those who, like Peters, aspire to help others help themselves long ago discovered that the secret to their own success lies in convincing others that they already have all the power they need to achieve their goals. A recent best-seller title in the self-help genre, The Secret, illustrates this point in extreme form. The secret in question turns out to be that we all create our own reality all of the time. Whether you get cancer or win the lottery, it's all your own doing. Norman Vincent Peale, one of the pioneers of the modern American self-help genre, says, "There is enough power in you to blow the city of New York to rubble. That, and nothing less, is what advanced physics tells us." And that, pretty much, is what Tom Peters tells us too. " ‘Getting things done' ultimately is not about ‘power' or ‘rank,' " Peters hyperventilates. "It's about PASSION and IMAGINATION and PERSISTENCE." In his books and presentations for the middle managers of the world, Peters regularly tosses out vignettes about Churchill, Gandhi, and Einstein. The message is that you, too, can make history.

5. Just look at me! In most cultures, the guru is a special person. He benefits from unique access to the mysterious forces of chaos lurking just under the deceptive surfaces of our world. Thus, he has the ability to intuit the movements of the cosmos and so to foretell our destiny. He doesn't have to prove what he says-he has the luxury of using what the medieval theologians called "the argument from authority." The guru, in fact, ceases to be a simple human being and becomes a representative of his own brand. He may grow out his hair, dress up in underwear, retire to the hills, or otherwise cultivate eccentricities. Everything he does and says carries a symbolic weight. He does not speak in sentences but in pronouncements. Sometimes he speaks in tongues. He is a master of twists, loud nonsense, and non sequiturs: "I'm a writer. I love words. One of the words I love is ‘quests,' " Peters says on one videotape.

"You know when Tom walks into a room. There's a buzz. All eyes are on him. He has a presence which is compelling and exciting," one of Peters' former associates confides to his biographer, Stuart Crainer. "People carried his books like the Bible. They were highlighted in different colors. They were well-thumbed and dog-eared through re-reading. There were fanatics who hung on every syllable. It was amazing to watch. It was like a religious cult." Another associate says he was astonished at "the reverence with which people thought of Tom." For many of his devotees, Tom was like "the Pope."

In America, where salvation has almost always been measured in cash value, the surest sign of the guru's special position in the order of things is his own material success. Tom Peters has certainly demonstrated that he is special. With a calendar of 60 or so money-spinning seminars a year, millions of books in print, an award-winning blog, a staff of 25 employees, and that 1,600-acre farm in Vermont to his name, Peters has collected many blessings from his message of corporate liberation. His competitor Jim Collins, like a number of other gurus, has also received huge down payments on his heavenly rewards.

The naysayers, as is their wont, will wonder whether the guru has any qualifications for the job other than his own success. Peters' actual experience in management, they will point out, is hardly one to inspire confidence in his advice. His longest period of employment was the six years or so (with significant interruptions for personal reasons) that he spent in the bubble universe of McKinsey, where the likelihood is that he never had to manage more than a couple of bright MBAs and a secretary at any one time. His own firm, the Tom Peters Group, is notorious for lackluster management and lackadaisical customer service. "My own experience is that TPG largely fails to practice what Peters preaches," writes Crainer. "Calls do go unreturned. There is the impression that the company is simply a means of screening Peters' calls."

As Peters understands, however, the authority of the guru does not stem from knowledge, degrees, or experience. It has its foundation in a personal narrative. The guru's story is one of triumph over adversity. It is his own passage through the dark night of the bureaucratic soul and his subsequent redemption and ascension into consulting heaven that cement his bond with his audience. His listeners need to know that he has suffered as they have, that he has witnessed the madness firsthand, that they're not crazy—it's just that the world has gone nuts. His own rise from the boiler room of a Navy warship to the commanding heights of the guru economy offers hope to us all.

"We are the only society in the world that believes it can keep on getting better and better," says Peters, in one of his postmodern, self-referential moments. "So we keep on getting suckered in by people like Ben Franklin and Emerson and me." One could debate whether the author of The Pursuit of WOW! overreaches by putting himself in the same sentence with such luminaries, but he is surely correct to point out that there is something very American in the manic spirituality that he and his fellow gurus promote.