Book review: the Medici Effect

I had the opportunity through work to read a business book, I think, called The Medici Effect by a gentleman named Frans Johansson.  Being something of a history buff, I thought it would have been interesting to read a book applying the lessons learned by the Tuscan "Royal Family" of bankers and assassins to business.

The verdict?  One star, and I'm being generous.  The ideas there are nothing new--restrain the accountants to actually allow your "artists" to shine and the like--and the author makes no attempt to actually connect the Medicis to the business cases he discusses.  In other words, the entire book is a gigantic, trite, bait and switch, and the Harvard Business Press let him get away with it.  The fact that this book got published is not exactly an endorsement of an Ivy League education, to put it mildly.

The only really good things I can say about this book are that it only took a couple hours to read, that he at least doesn't recommend hiring assassins to improve one's business, and that at least he didn't (as did another business book I picked up recently) get an endorsement from Ken Lay of Enron.  I won't be reading--or reviewing--that one.