In all probability

Nibble, nibble, nibble, I think I should confess, has been my basic approach to Harry Potter: a bit here, a snatch on TV there, and with no thought to the series' relevance to business ""even if the term "stake" conjures an instant if coincidental link. What's more, the title of this book, If Harry Potter Ran General Electric, is way too gimmicky. But its author Tom Morris doesn't just have If Aristotle Ran General Motors to his credit, he was once professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, too.

That clinches it. Morris explains his own interest in J K Rowling's fiction in Muggle (non-witch) terms as well. The struggle depicted in these stories is an internal one within the world of wizardry, and the toughest problems are rarely solved by magic, "but by the use of intelligence, reasoning, planning, courage, determination, persistence, resourcefulness, creativity, fidelity, friendship..." "" virtues extolled by Greek philosophers. To Morris, Harry Potter is a paragon of courage, the most important virtue, while his mentor at the witchcraft school Hogwarts, Aldus Dumbledore, is quite the Aristotelian figure, with words of wisdom "" "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities" "" that give the stories their moral stature.

Moral stature? Well, if Rowling's literary accomplishment has been to reposition "the other" as affection-worthy in the pre-adolescent mind of the West, Morris' apparent attempt is to do the same with the older mind. This is perhaps why he goes beyond "courage" defined simply as a midpoint between cowardice and carelessness in taking risks, as one might in business ("focus on what's at stake", he advises, as Harry always does). He goes into the courage needed to abide by moral imperatives under pressure.

And here, the author mounts an elaborate defence of Potter against the charge of "moral relativism". In a chapter on ethics that might bore Eastern readers but bewitch those given to greyless 0s and 1s, he argues in favour of qualifying the act of lying by its motive. Judged this way, Potter is a judicious wizard: he's a good guy. He tricks others only the way he himself would like to be tricked, and hey, remember the deception of Cyclops (the Greek equivalent of India's Bhasm story)?

Yet, in spite of its profit-fixation, the stock market is no Cyclops, writes Morris, delivering a rant against the sort of corporate governance that mistakes rulebook compliance for ethical behaviour. Rules and ethics differ. Some rules are plain silly""read that creation of bureaucrats, the tax code.

"What is wrong, and inevitably corrupting, is a focal quest for power for its own sake," Morris thunders on page 79, to negate the villainous wizard Voldermort's validations of his vain visions. And to negate which must Potter bend rules too. On the other hand, what the boy-wizard does affirm, he does clearly. And by using his faculties of reason: as Pascal the philosopher would have, in all probability (page 92). Shorn bare, this should've been the point of this book""by my choice.

There're more, though. It rounds off with a headscratch on happiness and a postulate on the power of soft values in business. There's also Potter's "Mirror of Erised" (desire spelt backwards), which reminds me of an Internet clip about medieval "witches" under suspicion of nursing unearthly desires deep under all those extra layers of cloth.

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IF HARRY POTTER RAN GENERAL ELECTRIC
LEADERSHIP WISDOM FROM THE WORLD OF WIZARDS

Tom Morris
Currency Doubleday
Price: $24.95; Pages: xx + 252