Mob management makes good copy but its real-world value is doubtful.

LOOKING for a way to close that next sales meeting?

Pull out a gun and tell the sales force that if they can't get the order book filled aby the end of the week, then they'll all be "sleeping with the fishes."

Worried that the guy at the next desk is angling for the same promotion you want?

Just clip him.

Stressed out at work and ground down by the daily routine of the office?

Just get involved in some extreme violence, then disappear for a course of therapy.

Two new books say there are lessons on how to run a business from the hit television drama series about a New Jersey crime family, "The Sopranos." The authors draw on the techniques of Tony Soprano, the mobster played by James Gandolfini in the show seen on HBO.

First off the presses was "leadership Sopranos Style" by Deborrah Himsel, who has been responsible for worldwide leadership development at the cosmetics giant Avon Products Inc., and has also worked for Pfizer Inc.

This month, we will be able to buy "Tony Soprano on Management" by Anthony Schneider, a management writer and leadership coach.

There is no genre of books easier to poke fun at than management guides (well, there are dating books and historical romances, but let's not split hairs). Most are a haven for half-baked theories, pious aspirations, and suffocating self-importance. Often it's hard to know if the people who write them are more ridiculous than the people who read them.

Glance through the publishers' lists of management guides and what you see is a parade of the inept lecturing the insecure. Into a preachy, didactic world, Himsel and Schneider are injecting a slither of nastiness.

The lessons of the Soprano books are nothing new:

Be decisive.

Get to the point.

Act tough.

Think quickly.

It's all good advice--nobody is going to complain about a boss who makes good decisions quickly. But you don't really need a mobster to deliver homilies like that.

Besides, the comparison between business and crime--like popular links between war and business, or politics and business--eventually collapses. That's because business doesn't allow coercion. If your employees don't like you, they can go and work for some one else. Your customers can always abandon you for the rival down the road. Your suppliers can stop taking your calls.

Tony Soprano shoots those who don't do what he says. Corporate executives can't do that. They have to persuade people to go along with them. That makes their job a lot tougher.

Tony Soprano as the new guru for managers? Fuggedaboudit!

Matthew Lynn is a columnist for Bloomberg News.