Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds

At first, I heartily enjoyed reading Professor Stapleton’s rather close manner of relating his family history, lineage, and how his folks, and their folks, had carved their living from proverbial stone using their business talents and stick-to-it attitude. However, as the narrative progressed, Stapleton began flashing back and forth in his time-line, pausing to mix in a bit of transactional analysis and then returning to talk about his relatives, a writing tactic which did little but muddy the water for this reader. Despite this, it struck me as interesting—if not ironic—that the author admitted resenting his own father’s tendency to ramble on in a rather non-cohesive fashion. If anything, his first section proved that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Stapleton also announced other parent-inspired resentments in his prose, such as a lack of physical affection and being goaded to work versus spending too much time “sitting around thinking.” He attributed the latter to a theory that parents fear their kids becoming “better” than they are and, therefore, strive to impede their success. Being a parent (and someone’s child) myself, I found this suggestion ridiculous, especially in a obesity-ridden culture, where it’s considered healthy—nay, the parent’s duty—to encourage children to sit a little less and move around a little more. A few of Professor Stapleton’s other notions took me by surprise, as in the insinuation that group imagoes (or, preconceived notions about groups by other groups/individuals) and religion are at the heart of all human conflict. The fact that humans have gone to war repeatedly over other matters—food, gold, civil rights, and land—must have slipped his mind, along with his own ‘group imago’ against parental figures.

Business owners and would-be entrepreneurs picking up this book may want to skip to page 109, where Stapleton begins to get to the meat of his main theme: good business practices. I found myself nodding my head in agreement to his emphasis on the great need for honesty in business, hard work, creative solutions, and the logical management of resources. Interspersed among the digressive philosophies are real-world examples of both failed and successful business practices, comparison data charts, statistical analysis, ideas on writing a business plan and entertaining allegorical ‘minutes’ taken at a fictional Skylab Business Conference/space commune.

Upon finishing this book, and considering my opinion of it, overall it reminded me that ‘bias’ is one of the most honest words in the English language.

$28.99 print, $3.90 electronic