Mr Mark Stevens was a man with a mission: where could he find a Top Gun academy where a hand-picked squad of elite managers would go through an intensive learning experience and be propelled into the world to achieve superiority in corporate war?

Could these lessons be used by anybody in business regardless of their experience or position?

And, like the plot in an Indiana Jones movie, could this hidden treasure be captured and revealed to the rest of us?

In the end he got more than he could have hoped for, hidden behind the world-famous Harvard Business School MBA course - a unique corporate training course called the Advanced Management Program (AMP).

This had been introduced at the beginning of the second World War to boost the US war effort and had quietly influenced the careers of leading executives for more than 50 years. Extreme Management reveals the secrets of the course and aims to put the reader into the classroom to share the AMP experience.

Mr Stevens, a consultant and columnist in the US, crunches a nine-week course into an easily digested book that can be read on a flight or sampled at random.

Extreme Management is a bit like courses that claim to be able to teach you a language in a few weeks - it suffers from being simplistic and promises more than it could ever deliver.

But it puts the reader in a fly-on-the-wall position, stopping just short of telling us what students eat during their daily breakfast discussion, and mixes interviews and summaries with anecdotes and examples.

As you would expect, the book is cheery and confident in typical US style.

The bottom line, as Mr Stevens would say, is that Extreme Management stands out from most books in this genre because it is accessible but informed.

If the quasi-military tone of the book is a little over-the-top, it does serve to get the message across.

And the book has to be good value for money when you consider the fee for the AMP course is $44,000 (€48,780).

jmulqueen@irish-times.ie