There is an endless stream of such books getting published. Some are written by famous successful business folks. Some are written by people you have never heard of, whose chief success is the writing of a book about success. I admit I have not read a lot of these books, but I have looked over the shoulder of the people next to me on the plane and gained some insight.

The way to go about this is to pick a topic that has nothing to do with business such as Japanese sword-fighting, quantum physics or perhaps the behaviour of an interesting wild animal like a tiger. Then relate all the facts you can find on Wikipedia about this topic to business. Repeat yourself a bit, throw in a bit of spirituality, come up with loads of anecdotes and you're done.

"The tiger stalks its prey with a focused sense of purpose, but remains at peace and relaxed. His movements are slow and deliberate, but where he sees his opportunity he will strike with deadly force. So too in his performance review, Harry spoke with calm and determination, never hurrying. But he was quick to seize the opportunity when it arose, to speak of his key achievements," for example.

The wonderful thing about this style of self-help book is that the onus is on the reader to adopt the strategy. If your career does not improve, it's not because thinking about tigers is not a slam-dunk recipe for success; it's because you didn't put the theory into practice properly. You didn't become the soul of the tiger or something like that. It's a bit the same with self-help nonsense books about healing. If your flu didn't go away, or your missing leg didn't grow back, it's because you didn't believe enough.

So that's one approach. Another approach is the shocking, reveal all, memoir. This is the style of book where you tell the world the truth about working in the marketing department. There aren't a lot of these about, because if you really did tell the truth about what happens every day at work, it really wouldn't be interesting enough for anyone to read. If you are an astronaut or rock star, sure, but if it's head of accounts or treasury, not really.

What does that leave? Actual how-to books, the sort of thing that a student studying banking or law or accounting might read. That would be quite useful. But writing a textbook on the subject of your day-to-day work is not a great deal different from simply being at work. And why get paid peanuts to write a book about derivatives trading, for example, when you can get paid mountains of cash for actually doing derivatives trading? Beware of the writers of textbooks.

And that, dear reader, brings us to my idea. Yes, I thought I might write a book too. I am of course writing about the way the management teams of today's corporations, banks and governments all somehow manage to stumble towards success despite the fact that they wouldn't know a good decision if their advisers happened to make one.

My protagonist, namely me, bumps time and again against the painful reality that success comes not to the smart, or the hardworking, or to the good, but to those who possess that special combination of unwavering belief in themselves, inability to notice their own lack of ability, and luck.

Readers will get to meet my clients, the people who although smart enough to recognise that they need advice, are not smart enough to ever follow it. My characters will include my co-workers - a collection of cheerful, bumbling numbskulls, angry, competitive psychopaths and outstanding intellectuals - who live in fear every day of being fired. I will even introduce the real folks whose lives get messed about by people like me. The engineers who lose their jobs after a merger, the farmers who get kicked off their land to make way for new projects, and of course, the shareholders who think investing in corporations run by disorganised egomaniacs is a good idea.

There is, however, one slight hitch with my plan to bring this strange world to the world. One topic I was planning to cover is the impact of the financial downturn on one or two noble projects. As if to illustrate this point, fate has conspired to prevent me from completing my own noble project by sending my publisher bankrupt.

Writing about business, in particular the mildly amusing but ultimately depressing reality, is my therapy and my only way of actually coping with my day-to-day work. So I really don't have a choice but to carry on bringing this world to the public one way or another. So as long as the newspaper industry manages to soldier on I at least have one outlet for my ravings, at least until Steve Jobs rescues the publishing industry.

I’m not kidding by the way.  I am writing a book and I do need a publisher...