Around the world - It's only copy-right?

The Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, the place where east meets west. Where 80 per cent inflation does strange things to property values overnight, not to mention the constantly spiralling fees of a breed of consultant I hadn’t met before – the inflation consultant.

What these people do is to advise you where best to invest your money and get it out again quick – when prices suddenly go your way. Trouble is, in a country where everyone is carrying a million or more around in their pockets and you can baffle Italian tourists, because its the first time they’ve ever had do long division to understand the prices, if you aren’t a genius at maths you can lose out big: you can lose out big in other ways too.

I’m here in this city where East meets West because my latest book is being translated into Turkish and there’s hyper-inflationary talk of seminars and conferences in the offing as launch date nears. The fact that the Turkish language is so weird to look at that you could walk right past your own book in a store has not escaped me. The fact that my publisher sold the rights for a lousy $750, “and I should think myself lucky”, has not escaped me either. For while Istanbul might be the beginning of the mysterious east, it is also the borderline for such mundane basic things we in the west take for granted as intellectual property rights and copyright.

“The chances of collecting royalties on books and other published material east of here are slim,” says my publisher, “people just don’t get it – they don’t understand what all the fuss is about.” And it’s not just us authors who get done over, Madonna, Paul McCartney and Oasis are all in the same leaky boat. Often they think they are doing you a favour.

Indeed when you stop and think about it, it’s not really all that surprising that the new tiger states of the East are doing so well – they got all the west’s ideas for free. Walk into any book-shop in Taiwan, of South Korea and you’ll see a lot of titles that aren’t earning any royalties for anyone.

Tales abound of this hard-nosed piracy – funny thing is, because there are no laws of property, no one sees much wrong with it. Maybe that’s why few consultants do well in the mystic East, secretly everyone knows all there is to know already.

Leading economist and former dean of MIT, Lester Thurow spoke to a group in Taiwan and was surprised to see his books on display in Chinese – the first he knew about it. None other than the grand-daddy of all consultants, Peter Ducker, was taken – with much pride he reports – by his Chinese hosts into a room that contained local knock-offs of every book he’d ever written.

They couldn’t understand why he was so unenthusiastic. British consultant Mark Thomas, author of Supercharge Your Management Role, was astounded to discover that he and his organisational development programme were being promoted all over South Korea – a country he has never visited and has no plans to do so. Asked why they were pirating his name and product the culprits said it added a certain cache to their sales campaign to have a westerner on the cover of their brochure. He, in turn has vowed never to buy a Daewoo car – which just isn’t quite the same thing.

Smart consultants know, that for sheer boardroom cred, writing a book – and preferably a minimum of two – is the golden key to boosting your fee rate and getting to sit at the top team table. For some obscure, unresearched and unexplained, reason CEOs, MDs and other corporate captains go gaga for people who have knocked out the odd business tome. That’s why we all do it for goodness sake – not because we have some unique message that we must spread to the managerial masses, without which they won’t be able to survive.

But business books, with very few exceptions, don’t sell in tens of thousands – I only wish they did. Which is why they tend to be expensive – on a word for word count about four times as expensive as Danielle Steele or Jeffrey Archer, which is why aspiring managers in developing countries, thirsting for knowledge are not able to afford them, at least not at the full price.

But they can afford cheap copies translated into local languages by publishers who don’t understand that the research and ideas, the blood, tears, toil and sweat of the poor author should be rewarded by royalties.

So to everyone who has ever written and business book – all those b-school professors, all those consultants – thank you. In your own way – alas unbeknown to you – you have helped students and managers in the far-flung places of our former empire to learn so damn much that they are now beating us in the marketplace.

Oh, but one final tip for all would-be business book writers – whatever you do, don’t write a two-lunch book. I had an accusing call from my publisher in Singapore, admonishing me for writing a two-lunch book.

“It’s supposed to be a fast easy read,” I countered.

He explained, “In Singapore two lunch book is exactly that. They go into book-shop and read one half first lunchtime, then they come back and read second part next lunchtime. Problem is they don’t buy it – just read it!”

Pirate copies or sneak reading: maybe as far as the mysterious East is concerned it might be better if we just let it go on being mysterious.

Mike Johnson is president of Johnson & Associates, a corporate communications firm in Brussels and author of Managing in the Next Millennium and Getting a GRIP on Tomorrow.