The Bay Street Boys

They might have started out as autobiographies, but somewhere along the line both Donald K. Johnson’s Lessons Learned on Bay Street and Tony Comper’s Personal Account morphed into a kind of hybrid genre influenced by Peter Drucker–style management thinkers and self-help messiahs like Tony Robbins. Johnson and Comper have lived long, peripatetic lives, often with the inside track on dramatic moments in Canadian business — moments that have had repercussions for all of us. But with these books, they spend almost no time on the scandals and revelations of their fascinating careers, instead suggesting how any of us can turn around our lives or our businesses with the help of a couple hundred pages of their wisdom.

It may also be the ubiquitous case-study approach to business education that’s shaped Johnson’s and Comper’s content. In today’s typical MBA program, wannabe masters of the universe learn by analyzing stories of real-life challenges...