The fall business book season was scheduled to kick off in Manhattan at 11:00 a.m. on Sept. 11 -- two hours and 15 minutes after the first hijacked airliner slammed into the World Trade Center.

Jack Welch's highly touted, embargoed autobiography, Jack: Straight From The Gut, (Warner Business Books) was to be released, and as part of the effort to sell the one million copies needed for the publisher to simply break even, Mr. Welch was to begin a publicity tour that included chats with both Jay Leno and David Letterman.

Other publishers were counting on sales in his wake: A few weeks earlier, McGraw-Hill had released The Jack Welch Lexicon of Leadership, in which Jeffrey Krames, publisher of its trade division, looks at the many management ideas associated with Mr. Welch, and how they evolved.

Mr. Welch's publicity offensive was temporarily derailed, but no doubt before the fall business season has concluded, his book will have been swallowed up by many eager to learn his secrets. "People can't seem to get enough of these guys who are in the news all the time," says Jane Cooney, president of Toronto's Books for Business.
But it's not just guys this season. The biggest challenger to Mr. Welch may turn out to be somebody who is even better known and can also, unlike most writers, get on the Leno and Letterman shows: Erin Brockovich. Her book on motivation, Take It From Me: Life's a Struggle But You Can Win (McGraw-Hill), promises to show how to develop the courage to overcome any obstacle. It's not just aimed at CEOs but also at people in dead-end jobs (and there are more of those around). It's due in December.

Against those two, Jim Collins may not stand a chance. But the co-author of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, arguably the best business book of the past decade, is back with Good to Great (HarperBusiness), which offers a blueprint for transforming good companies into great ones.

Canadian Books
If there's a big Canadian name to add to the list, it's one with a talk show of her own: Pam Wallin. Although Speaking of Success: Collected Wisdom, Insights and Reflections (Key Porter) is based more on musicians, actors, writers and athletes who have appeared on her show than business leaders, her essays about living life successfully and with purpose will appeal to many managers.

The two conventional business books that will likely draw the most attention are about Bombardier and a Canadian Tire heiress. Larry MacDonald, who last fall chronicled Nortel Networks, is back with The Bombardier Story: Planes, Trains and Snowmobiles (John Wiley), which shows how the company grew from modest beginnings in rural Quebec to a global transportation manufacturer.

In Can't Buy Me Love (Stoddart), veteran business writer Rod McQueen turns his attention to the spicy story of Martha Biles, one of the country's wealthiest businesswomen, who in 1997 took control from her brothers of Canadian Tire, and more recently made headlines in a courtroom battle with an ex-lover.

Journalist William Illsley Atkinson crosses Canada to profile the people and companies making biological and technological breakthroughs in Prototype: How Canadian Innovation is Shaping The Future (Thomas Allen). Sherry Cooper, the chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns, surveys what she calls "the acceleration age" in Ride The Wave (Prentice Hall). And from the opposite side of the fence politically, best-selling author Linda McQuaig provides a feisty critique of how greed has become the central organizing principle of our society in All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and The New Capitalism (Penguin).

Leadership and Strategy
If you have been meaning to read Peter Drucker but haven't, your rain cheque has arrived: The Essential Drucker (HarperBusiness), which collects in one volume the best of the renowned management writer's work over the past 60 years. Another sage, Warren Buffett, will have his views on management explained in The Warren Buffett CEO (John Wiley), by Robert Miles, which looks at the culture and management principles of Berkshire Hathaway, the company he founded, and the managers of the major companies he has owned.

Michael Useem, director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School of Business, uses examples from a variety of companies, politics, and the Bible to show how to lead your boss so you both win, in Leading Up (Crown).

In Don't Kill The Bosses! (Berrett-Koehler), Samuel Culbert and John Ullmen describe how to escape the trap of hierarchy, which tends to be suffused with dishonesty and deceit, and instead build a two-way system of accountability. Steven Sample, president of the University of Southern California, challenges many conventional views of leadership in The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership (Jossey-Bass), offering rules such as don't read everything that crosses your desk; always put off decisions; and sometimes compromise your principles.

Michael Hammer, who helped to popularize re-engineering, presents The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate in the Decade (Crown), outlining nine principles that he says everyone in business needs to know for success.

On the other hand, Frederick Reichheld, a long-time Bain consultant, preaches one main principle -- loyalty -- and earlier this month followed up his insightful The Loyalty Effect with Loyalty Rules! (Harvard Business School), which provides practical advice on building lasting relationships with customers, employees, suppliers, and investors.

Consultants Stacey Hall and Jan Brogniez invite readers to move beyond seeking market share to Attracting Perfect Customers (Berrett-Koehler); they outline a process of "strategic synchronicity" to draw customers that are a perfect fit for your organization and ignore others. And in The War For Talent (Harvard Business School) three consultants from McKinsey & Company -- Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield Jones and Beth Axelrod -- provide a strategic view for how to build a stronger talent pool to drive success.

How-To Books
There are a slew of how-to books, as always, but the big theme this season is how to create innovation. The most unusual is from magician David Ben, who speaks on creativity and problem-solving to companies such as Bell Canada, Imperial Oil and Scotiabank, and probes magic, deception, and enhanced productivity in Advantage Play: The Manager's Guide to Creative Problem-Solving (Key Porter).

The Drucker Foundation presents a collection of experts in Leading for Innovation (John Wiley), edited by Frances Hesselbein and Marshall Goldsmith.

Other books tackling the same theme include: Return on Imagination: Realizing the Power of Creativity (Prentice Hall), by Tom Wujec and Sandra Muscat; The Business of Innovation: Managing The Corporate Imagination for Maximum Results (Amacom), by Roger Bean and Russell Radford; Ideaship: How to Get Ideas Flowing in Your Workplace (Berrett-Koehler), by Jack Foster; and the fourth edition of Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas (Perseus), by James Adams.

In Focal Point (Amacom), Brian Tracy tells how to be more effective by concentrating on the one thing you can do, at any given time, to get the best possible results. Consultant Jean Hollands has a book of special interest to women, Same Game, Different Rules: How to Get Ahead Without Being a Bully Broad, Ice Queen, or Ms. Understood (McGraw-Hill).

And for those who want their advice from athletes, you can choose between Michael Jordan or Isiah Thomas.
How to Be Like Mike: Life Lessons from Basketball's Best (Thomas Allen) by Pat Williams takes its insights from Mr. Jordan, while Isiah Thomas, the ex-Raptors general manager, has written The Fundamentals: 8 Plays for Winning The Game of Business and Life (HarperBusiness).

Technology Books
The flood of dot-com books has dried up. New entries for the fall try to acknowledge the problems of the recent past and draw lessons for the future.

Two that will draw attention, for their titles if nothing else, are Business @ The Speed of Stupid (Perseus), by Dan Burke and Alan Morrison, which looks at the myths and lies that led to the technology shakeout and how to avoid them; and Dot.Bomb (McGraw-Hill) by Sean Carton, which tries to separate what works from what doesn't in the new economy.

Jim Carroll and Rick Broadhead, the prolific writers who have guided so many Canadians on to the Internet, provide a reality check in Get A (Digital) Life, (Stoddart), which argues that the Internet will still be deeply important to business, the economy and individual career management.

Mr. Welch's book may be the top seller, but the others may provide insights to issues you're struggling with. Harvey Schachter, a freelance writer based in Battersea, Ont., is co-author with Carol Beatty, director of the industrial relations centre at Queen's University, of Employee Ownership: The New Source of Competitive Advantage (John Wiley), due in December. his@kos.net.