The 110% Solution.

• Author: Evans, Jeffrey

THE 110% SOLUTION

This is Mark H. McCormack's fourth book. His first was the tremendously popular What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School, a book that still enjoys steady hardcover sales.

McCormack is the founder of International Management Group, a billion-dollar public-relations company that since the 1960s has helped catapult professional sports to a megaindustry.

McCormack's company has represented such stellar athletes as Arnold Palmer, Jean Claude Killy, Jackie Stewart, Ivan Lendl, and scores of others. Sports Illustrated once referred to McCormack as the "most powerful man in sports," due no doubt to his work in making millionaires of golfers and skiers. The 110% Solution, a business self-help book, is based almost entirely on McCormack's observations of what makes successful athletes so good. It is McCormack's mission to translate the secrets and methods of sports superstars for ordinary people who work in what McCormack calls the "civilian world." McCormack, that is, is offering you and me the opportunity to transform ourselves from civilians to superstars.

McCormack's complaint, and the reason he has written the book, is that, unlike the world of sports, civilian life is far too lax. We are not expected to give our all. Indeed, we can all too often get by with giving only a 50-percent or a 75-percent effort in our endeavors. Such a state of affairs would be disastrous in the sports world. Superstar athletes are so good, McCormack argues, because they are willing to give 110 percent of themselves on any given day. McCormack pleads that we should also be prepared to give 110 percent.

The 110% Solution, then, presents itself as a manual for the radical redevelopment of the individual worker. But there is something not quite right in the way McCormack would have us all become superstars. McCormack may be a tremendously successful businessman, and an otherwise engaging author, but as an entrant into the self-help game, he flagrantly misses the mark.

McCormack first tells us that we must find our genius. If this sounds remarkably like Joseph Campbell's injunction to "find your bliss," it is not uncharacteristic. So much of McCormack's rhetoric is gleaned from pop psychology and best-selling books as to be redundant. For McCormack, finding your genius simply means doing what you do best as much as you can and doing your best to make a buck doing it.

Thus, his second recommendation: Do not Stray from Your Genius: Once you...