Tale of a management guru as superhero Publishers and authors have done everything possible to ensure time-poor businesspeople can "read" business books without actually having to read them. The assumption seems to be that a stressed executive should be able to skim such books and still draw useful conclusions from the bold-print chapter recaps, 150-word case studies, flow-charts, graphics and "key learnings" that break up the text. If that is too time-consuming, managers can subscribe to book-summary services that purée these tiny lumps of advice to the consistency of baby food. It is surprising, therefore, that the market for comic-strip business classics is not bigger, because in the case of a new version of Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter's What Got You Here Won't Get You There this treatment gets the message across more quickly, and more entertainingly, than more orthodox publications can. Goldsmith is a well-known US leadership coach, and his 2008 version was a bestseller. But in truth, it fitted a pretty standard template for the management self-help genre. It mixed anonymised, US-centric client cases ("This hit me when I began working with the CEO of a large service company. Let's call him Steve . . . ") with personal anecdotes, written in a breezy but firm style. The central message was stated, restated and then re-restated. The lessons were imparted in the form of readable lists, such as "the 20 habits that hold you back from the top." Goldsmith is a disciple of Peter Drucker, the great Austrian-born management consultant and teacher. Drucker wrote with unparalleled clarity but it is hard to see how his more nuanced arguments could be rendered in comic-strip form. However, cartoonist Shane Clester manages to turn Goldsmith's simple injunctions into the misadventures of a deep-sea diver, an astronaut, a builder and a big-game hunter-cum-explorer - four flawed leaders. Goldsmith himself is flatteringly depicted as an omniscient observer, propelled between case studies by jetpack. The mind boggles at the idea of a jet-powered Drucker. Some of the flights of fancy are a stretch. For Habit #14 - "playing favourites" - Clester has the diver riding a fawning yes-dolphin, for instance. But, oddly, it seems to work. For a fuller treatment of the same management dilemmas you will still have to revisit the original - which may be the point of the exercise. The comic-strip also leaves out many of the first book's anecdotes and tells you little or nothing about Goldsmith himself (he is the sort of man who, in trying to be a better dad, obsessively measures how much time he spends with his children). But the cartoon version is an amusing alternative, with all the useful advice in pill-sized form. An ambitious executive with attention-deficit issues could bolt it down between meetings. Which raises an awkward question: if the essence of Goldsmith's 14 chapters can be encapsulated in just 50 illustrated pages, how much substance was there in the original? The writer is the Financial Times management editor