Richer. Smarter. Faster. : MANAGING IN A TIME OF GREAT CHANGE,<i> By Peter F. Drucker (Truman Talley Books/Dutton: $24.95; 384 pp.)</i> : BEYOND CERTAINTY: The Changing World of Organizations,<i> By Charles Handy (Harvard Business School Press: $19.95; 240 pp.)</i>

Here I sit contemplating this 2-foot pile of new business books, most of them promising to lead me to new heights of achievement at the office if not necessarily to fortune or fame.

Books with tiresomely cute titles: “The Mafia Manager,” “Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers.”

Books with purely tiresome titles: “Taking Charge of Change” and “Reinventing Leadership.” Books I’m half-certain I saw a year or two ago under slightly different titles and that I fully expect to see again next year under still others.

As I try to figure out what to say about all this stuff, my mind drifts back to a moment in the mid-1980s when all the senior executives of McDonnell Douglas Corp.’s far-flung empire were assembled in the boardroom on the top floor at headquarters. We were there to be preached to about “cultural change” and “organizational self-renewal” and other portals to some misty promised land. We were being liberated from old ways of thinking and shown how to transform an enterprise that had never been more than a mere fabulous success into something unnameable but wonderfully different and better.

Standing before the assembly, in the only scene from that day I can now recall, was the tanned young president of one of McDonnell Douglas’ new (but doomed, as we would eventually learn) information systems divisions. He had traveled thousands of miles for the meeting and had (probably to increase the CEO’s awareness of his zeal for innovation, not to mention his existence), volunteered to give a demonstration of mental adventuresomeness. Behind him, projected on a screen in bright colors, were the three core words of his message:

“Ready! Fire! Aim!”

In other words, abandon those dreary old notions about thinking before taking action. Don’t plan so much. Don’t bog down in preparations and deliberations and testing. Shoot first and ask questions later. Leap before you look. Just do it!

Looking on in stony silence were perhaps two-dozen battle-hardened leaders of one of the biggest aerospace corporations in the world. Many of them were white of hair and furrowed of brow. They commanded tens of thousands of highly educated workers, they dealt in billions of dollars, they were creators of jet fighters and airliners and rockets fired into space. They were not fools.

Suddenly it occurred to me that not one of these men could possibly believe what we were being told. Not even the speaker could possibly have believed his own message. I was tempted to say so but didn’t have the nerve. I’m sure I wasn’t alone.

And that, I think, is pretty much how things have gone in the booming business-wisdom industry ever since. Change has been promoted from fact of life to god--an omnipresent force to be worshiped as well as feared--and almost anyone with suggestions on how to win divine favor is likely to find an audience somewhere. Audiences, of course, equal money. The inevitable result is this endless flood of books, each with its formula for salvation.

Some of the ideas on which recent books have been constructed are demonstrably wrong, else how could so many of the companies celebrated in the best-selling “In Search of Excellence” have so quickly run into trouble? Some are transparently ridiculous, as is the very title of one recent offering, “Jesus CEO.” Many try far too hard to be devilishly clever but most prove under examination to be sensible enough if only in smallish ways.

Many of these books get written because authorship is good for the careers of business professors and management consultants. They get published in such numbers because there’s no sure way of knowing which might show up on the credenza of some celebrity billionaire, become the next fad, and make a nice bundle for everybody involved. It’s mostly a game and mostly ridiculous but nobody seems willing to say so.

Despite all the nonsense, we still face a central challenge: effectively managing our increasingly gigantic and arcane business organizations. And a task so grand, so complicated and so important is attracting the attention of at least a few writers who actually have something to say. The worthwhile nontechnical business book is not an entirely imaginary species. This spring’s bushel of chaff contains two plump grains of ripe wheat: stimulating essay collections by management gurus of solid reputation, Peter F. Drucker and Charles Handy.

Both men are less concerned with the how-to of management than with questions of what corporations can and should do and be as the 20th century draws to its close. The importance that Drucker and Handy attach to such questions is noteworthy at a time when executives commonly say that their ultimate responsibility is to make money and commonly suggest (at least by implication) that people with contrary ideas should go soak their heads. Equally impressive, when compared with so many of the other books in my pile, is the refusal of either Drucker or Handy to pretend that he has more answers than questions.

In “Managing in a Time of Great Change,” Drucker, who has been writing provocative business books for half a century, demonstrates that he can be relied upon for more insights per volume than any of his putative heirs. This collection of his shorter writings is rich in what its title promises, dealing with subjects as varied as the special needs of family businesses, the use and misuse of teams, the role of information and the kinds of markets now emerging.

What’s even more interesting, though, is what Drucker sees when he looks at business in its broadest social context. He sees trouble brewing in the tension between the reliance of business organizations on change, innovation and, as Joseph Schumpeter put it, “creative destruction” and the need of families, communities and society at large for “continuity and stability.” He refrains from predicting what is likely to happen to families and communities as the pace of change accelerates and business expands its dominance of our culture. But only worshipers of the market will find much comfort in his prediction that the society now taking shape around us “will inevitably become far more competitive than any society we have yet known.”

Handy, who has evolved over the decades from oil company executive to teacher to consultant and successful author, now calls himself a social philosopher and comes close to deserving the title. In “Beyond Certainty,” he devotes nearly 30 pages to a question that not many business writers would even ponder: What is a company for? His answer is that companies must learn to regard themselves not as property but as communities, that each community must work out its own purposes and that no company’s final purpose can be only the making of profits. In support of that last point he invokes St. Augustine on the confusion of ends and means. Murky as this can become at points, a weary reader cannot fail to be grateful for Handy’s mixture of boldness and humility. One becomes grateful also for his willingness to deal with human realities that seldom show up in business books--the fear, for example, that so pervades many large organizations as to make them nearly (Handy’s word) “uninhabitable.”

The other books in my pile merge into a kind of bromide blur, canceling each other out in some instances (e.g., with their varying definitions of leadership) or being canceled out by the real masters. Several of their authors are, for example, enthusiastic about “empowerment”--a nostrum that Drucker and Handy treat with a skepticism strongly tinged with disdain.

This is not to say that, individually, they are devoid of interest. Richard Farson, for example, has concocted a charming little confection called “Management of the Absurd” (Simon & Schuster) out of assorted paradoxes, some of which are fun (“The Opposite of a Profound Truth Is Also True”), and some of which are banal (“Listening Is More Difficult Than Talking”). His final paradox, “My Advice Is Don’t Take My Advice,” encourages doubt about how serious Farson actually is.

Farson’s paradoxes, and all the other clever things in all the other books, wilt under Drucker’s stern insistence that authentic business leadership not only has nothing to do with but is positively incompatible with hooking onto the latest, niftiest trends. “It is not genius,”’ Drucker says of management. “It is hard work. It is not being clever, it is being conscientious. It is what CEOs are paid for.”