When planning his semiannual visit to New York this year, my 11-year-old nephew told me there was only one place in the city he really wanted to go. I rolled out my guesses: the Empire State Building? Ellis Island? The Bronx Zoo? No, no and no. His dream destination? Trump Tower. It turns out my nephew—whose other interests include Yu-Gi-Oh cards, Star Wars movies and his pet cat—is a Donald Trump fan. More specifically, he's a fan of The Apprentice, Trump's top-rated reality show on NBC, now in its fifth season. Inspired by his idol, my nephew considers himself a tycoon-in-training. I half-expect him to bill me for this interview.

In the era of the "MBA president," business has moved out of its niche and into the mainstream. With apologies to Calvin Coolidge, business is no longer just the business of America: it's our obsession. Not only do Americans work more hours than do residents of any other industrialized nation (according to data from the International Labour Organization) but more than half of them (52%) are stockholders. Hence, even Joe Sixpack might have an interest in who gets what executive pay and how long-term financial trends are playing out.

Not since the late 1980s, when Michael Douglas won an Oscar for his portrayal of Gordon "greed is good" Gekko in the movie Wall Street and Michael J. Fox won an Emmy for playing adolescent supply-sider Alex P. Keaton on TV's Family Ties, have businesses and the people who run them been so firmly center stage in American culture. All reality shows, not only The Apprentice, mimic the dog-eat-dog corporate race to the top. (And publishers are genuflecting before the Donald with a deluge of Trump-related titles this summer and fall, four from Wiley alone.)

As a result, sales of business books are up, even as the number of titles published remains steady. Nielsen BookScan figures show growth for the category overall, with 2005 figures higher than those for 2004, and projections for 2006 higher still. At the 799-store Barnes & Noble chain, business buyer David Hathaway says sales of business books are growing "substantially."

"Joseph Campbell, the well-known mythologist and philosopher, pointed out that throughout history, one could always determine the dominant institution in a society by looking at the height of its buildings," says BJ Gallagher, coauthor of A Peacock in the Land of Penguins (Berrett-Koehler, 2001). "In centuries past, the tallest buildings were the churches in small towns and cathedrals in the big cities. Then came the era of big government buildings. Today, as we scan the skylines of our cities and towns, it is clear to see which buildings dominate—those of big business and financial institutions. Today, it is business which sets the tone, drives the economy and influences the values of society."

Philip Ruppel, group publisher at McGraw-Hill, whose 17-year-old daughter recently announced that she intends to study business in college rather than pursuing a liberal arts degree, puts it more succinctly: "Economics has become cool."

When McGraw-Hill published A Thousand Barrels a Second, about the oil industry, in January, author Peter Tertzakian landed a coveted slot on The Daily Show on Comedy Central. "Ten or 15 years ago," Ruppel says, "that kind of book would have been perceived as a dull economics treatise and treated as such. I would never in a million years have thought we would publish a book by an economist about the issues in the oil crisis and get it anywhere but CNN or CNBC."

Rock Stars of the Business World

Nowhere is the mainstreaming of business as apparent as it is in the sales of nonfiction titles like Tertzakian's A Thousand Barrels a Second, books that touch on business but are far from dry "how-tos" for corporate honchos. Jack Covert, president and founder of the specialized business bookseller 800-CEO-READ, calls titles like Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat (FSG, 2005), Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (Little, Brown, 2000) and Blink (Little, Brown, 2005) and Freakonomics (Morrow, 2005) by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, the next wave in business books.

"These are books that take a simple premise and hold it out in their hands and look at it from 25 angles," says Covert. "It's not a dumbing down. It's changing the way we look at things. The old management books have been replaced by business narratives." Covert predicts that Charles Fishman's The Wal-Mart Effect (Penguin Press, Jan.) will be the next business narrative to make its author a household—or board room—name.

Gladwell is now a "rock star" in the business community, agrees Portfolio publisher Adrian Zackheim. Meanwhile, as of this writing, The World Is Flat and Freakonomics have each been on the PW hardcover nonfiction bestseller list for 51 weeks.

These books attract mainstream readers as well as business readers. In fact, one could argue that they're not "business books" at all, but simply general nonfiction. They certainly play to a general audience. In our business-mad culture, the guy mopping the executive washroom at night is just as likely as the guy with the key who uses it during the day to turn out books like The Tipping Point.

Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald, published by Broadway in March of last year, now has close to 300,000 hardcovers and paperbacks in print. A PW review said that in limning the collapse of Enron, Conspiracy of Fools "gets as close to what actually happened, in terms of people making [bad] decisions in real time, as anyone who wasn't there with a concealed video-phone possibly could." David Drake, Doubleday/Broadway executive director of publicity, says the title was conceived to "appeal to readers whose tastes run toward John Grisham's legal thrillers."

So, is it a business book? The publisher classified it as one. (PW listed Conspiracy of Fools as "True Crime.") Booksellers shelved it as one, and Hathaway of Barnes & Noble reports that it not only sold well but attracted customers who usually bypass the business section altogether. He expects to see similar results with The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (Hyperion, July), a chatty and readable treatise on the impact of iTunes and on-demand cable channels on the measurement of popular taste.

Warner Business editorial director Rick Wolff scoffs at narrow definitions of business books and argues that a good business list is "a contrarian's list." To illustrate, he tosses off a range of 2006 Warner Business titles: "In February we did The Coming Economic Collapse, a book about oil. In April we did No More Cold Calling, a book about selling. And in May we have Green with Envy, about why so many Americans seem to live beyond their financial means."

Jeff Brown, general manager at Wiley for business, psychology and education titles, refers to titles such as the Malcolm Gladwell books as "business books beyond a business context," but thinks it's fair to classify them as business books just the same. Notes Brown, "The evolution of business is part of people's lives, and needs and interests have become very broad and diverse. The boundaries aren't exactly where they used to be."

Working Nine to Nine

If business has moved to the foreground in American lives, technology's effect on that shift cannot be overestimated. With the widespread use of cellphones, high-speed Internet connections and the addictive BlackBerry (aka "CrackBerry"), employees are on call 24/7. Kaplan publisher Maureen McMahon says, "The lines between work life and personal life have blurred."

That blurring, say publishers, accounts for a curious aspect of books in this category. If you took a large number of business books and did a global search and replace, changing "office" to "home," they'd be self-help relationship books.

The whole category has been "psychologized," with authors as likely to be therapists as they are titans of business. For example, Robert K. Cooper, author of Get Out of Your Own Way: The 5 Keys to Surpassing Everyone's Expectations (Crown, Apr.) is a neuroscientist, not an MBA. Riding the Blue Train, to be published by Portfolio in November, is based on the touchy-feely idea that "in order to build your business, you first need to build your people."

And consider Working with You Is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work (Warner Business) by Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster, which with its colloquial title and casual coffee-cup cover echoes relationship titles such as Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo's He's Just Not That into You.

Likewise, Roger Scholl, editorial director of Doubleday/Currency, reports that the house has 150,000 copies of Keith Ferrazzi's Never Eat Alone (2005) in print, and more than 300,000 copies of Mark Sanborn's The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary (2004). Such books are "aimed at our careers, but there's a spillover," according to Scholl.

Besides, Scholl and others say, straddling the line between work and home opens up greater sales possibilities. Hollis Heimbouch, associate publisher and editorial director of Harvard Business School Press, says, "In one way or another, everyone is involved in some aspect of organizational life—whether it is managing a staff of 20, leading a community organization or learning to manage oneself more effectively. We want to publish books that speak to the whole person."

Stephan B. Poulter first conceived of his May title from Prometheus, The Father Factor: How Your Father's Legacy Impacts Your Career, as a self-help book. Poulter, a clinical psychologist, says, "There's a human side to business. Personnel problems are taking up 80% of a manager's time, and if you have a hard time with relationships, you're going to have a hard time working at the library. A lot of guys will say, 'I make good money,' but they're writing alimony checks and their kids hate them."

Liza Siegel, author of Suite Success: The Psychologist from The Apprentice Reveals What It Really Takes to Excel—in the Boardroom and in Life (Amacom, May), says that we misunderstand why we work, which leads to unhappiness on the job. "We think we're motivated by our paychecks and making money," she explains, "but that's at the bottom of the hierarchy of needs. What's really important to people is a sense of belonging."

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Is Dead

Everybody feels involved in business these days in part because with our increasingly diverse workforce more people than ever before see themselves reflected in the faces of management. Consider the quiet disappearance of the man in the gray flannel suit, the white male breadwinner and office drone played by Gregory Peck in the movie of the same name, released 50 years ago. The ethnic and gender makeup of the workforce has mutated so dramatically that there is no one typical kind of businessperson anymore.

"Today's business environment is more diverse than ever before and will continue to be so," says Peacockauthor Gallagher. "Today, more people work for women-owned businesses than work for the entire Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. combined, and 70% of all new businesses formed in the past two decades have been founded by women. The man in the gray flannel suit has long since been downsized."

Says Zackheim at Portfolio, "Today it's the woman in the Armani suit as opposed to the man in the gray flannel suit." According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of women employed in "management, professional and related occupations" continues to climb year by year.

Indeed, publishers of business management books have kept pace with the diversification of the workforce. In August, McGraw-Hill will publish Hit the Ground Running, a guide for women executives. In June, the Jossey-Bass imprint at Wiley will publish Kirk Snyder's The G Quotient, about gay men and leadership, while Ballantine, also in June, will offer Think and Grow Rich: A Latino Choice by Lionel Sosa, in paperback.

It's not only diversity that has changed the workplace. Heimbouch of HBSP points to the presence of "aging baby boomers, the influx of workers raised on computer games and the growing disengagement and frustration of those in the middle—what several of our authors call 'middlescence.' Many conventional and stereotypical models of executive power—the hard-charging, egomaniacal alpha male—are being rejected."

In 1973, Edward Lawler, currently a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, contributed to Work in America, a government report on the workplace that garnered so much attention (including a Newsweek cover story) that MIT Press published it as a paperback and sold 125,000 copies. That study, says Lawler, is passé now. In July, Palgrave Macmillan will publish a follow-up, The New American Workplace, by Lawler and James O'Toole (chair of the original task force), based on research done in the last 30 years. "The biggest overall change we zeroed in on," says Lawler, "is the number of choices people have today has expanded tremendously, but commensurate with that are the risks they face. The workplace is enormously more complex."

The Overworked Global Employee

There may be a bit of the oppressed loving the oppressor in our fascination with business. That's the dark side to the boom in sales of business books: those spikes in sales over the last few years also reflect tremendous worry and unease.

Lynda Fitzgerald, frontlist buyer for the nine-store Barbara's Bookstores chain, says there's no "sudden influx of fascinating titles" in the category causing sales to rise. Instead, people are desperate to hang onto their jobs, and they're scrambling to stay informed so that they don't get pink slips. Fitzgerald sees "absolute abject terror on the part of most people working in big business. They know they're dispensable. If their corporate overlords catch them not working for two minutes out of their lives, they're going to be deemed lazy and they're going to be kicked out."

Fitzgerald is right about one thing: in the U.S., job security is a thing of the past. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2002 Americans were averaging 10 different jobs between the ages of 18 and 38.

Worse, outsourcing and offshoring are plucking jobs from the U.S. and locating them in lower-cost markets. A 2002 report from Forrester Research estimated that between 2000 and 2015, 3.3 million jobs will leave this country. By 2003, more than half of the Fortune 500 companies had moved jobs out of the country. Deloitte Consulting chimes in with the prediction that in the financial services business, two million jobs will leave Europe and the United States for cheaper pastures. For businesses, globalization has become more than just a watchword—it's a reality, and often a harsh one for workers.

Yet B&N's Hathaway observes that what's bad for workers may be good for sales of business books: "What's driving the business section now is that Americans are having to be more competitive than we ever had to be before because of the whole movement to a global economy. There is an audience of people who don't necessarily want to read a business book, but are being forced to because they need to compete."

At Crown Business, publisher Steve Ross agrees that cheery news of growing book sales may be masking a more bleak reality. "There is an underlying sense of unease across the economy," he says, "even while the stock market is at a seven-year high. More people are anxious and hungry, and they're increasingly eager to improve their performance to increase job [security] in addition to job satisfaction."