The Nasdaq is falling, and the dotcoms are failing, but the guru business is booming. n The echoes of their punditry are everywhere. We read their pearls in business magazines (including CIO). We listen to their wisdom in our conference halls. We sit enthralled in the privacy of our own corporate boardrooms. We business folk eat this stuff up, and it’s no mystery why. Business is scary. It’s always been scary, but these days it’s scarier than ever. Between dotcoms and Dilbert, managers are being downsized, rightsized, transferred and transported out of their sinecures. Those of us who survive are inundated by calls from our bosses to embrace whatever the higher-ups think will save their bacon that day--whether it’s TQM, ERP, CRM or SCM.

We’re also besieged from below by staffers demanding that we DO SOMETHING to keep our increasingly egalitarian workplaces happy, happy, happy!

At the same time, there are evermore young turks out there ready to snatch our jobs. The United States produced more than 75,000 MBAs in 1996 (15 times the number churned out in 1960).

So, looking for some port in the storm, workplace warriors spend lots of money--$750 million a year in the United States--on books like The Change Masters (Rosabeth Moss Kanter) and Managing in a Time of Great Change (Peter Drucker). Of course, buying these tomes is easy, but who has time to read them? Fuhgeddaboutit. So we shell out fortunes to go to conferences to bring these pundits to our organizations for a little personal, customized, hands-on attention.

And the bigger we are the more we spend. Companies with sales from $10 million to $10 billion spend around 0.2 percent of their revenues on outside advice, and companies with sales that top $25 billion fork over a whole 0.3 percent, according to the Kennedy Information Research Group, a consulting and research shop based in Fitzwilliam, N.H. Brian Sommer, CEO of IQ4hire, a Chicago-based consultant placement service, estimates that the annual global price tag for punditry of all sorts comes to $20 billion.

That’s a lot of money going to a relatively small industry, and, rest assured, the gurus know how to spend it. Tom Peters, a leading management speaker, trainer, consultant and best-selling author of In Search of Excellence, owns an 11-building farm in Vermont, complete with a swimming pond and a sap house for making maple syrup. Ethernet inventor, 3Com founder and venture partner at Waltham, Mass.-based Polaris Venture Partners Bob Metcalfe runs a farm in Lincolnville, Maine, that breeds endangered livestock. Anthony Robbins, the business-motivational pundit, owns an 8,000-square-foot house, known as Del Mar Castle, in San Diego and a resort in Fiji. Edward de Bono, a prolific writer and lecturer on creative thinking, hosts seminars on his private island off the coast of Italy, near the lovely city of Venice.