Aligning the Stars: How to Succeed When Professionals Drive Results by Jay W Lorsch and Thomas J Tierney. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002; 234 pages; $29.95.

Business books are like fashion fads: Many of them rise up to take the industry by storm, appearing suddenly in seemingly everyone's bookcase. But only the best of them outlast that first rush -whether it's a few months or a few years -and survive over the long term. Time will tell if Aligning the Stars is a double-breasted suit or a jacket out of Miami Vice.

Jay Lorsch and Thomas Tierney's book is geared in particular to professional service firms (PSFS), which they define as companies that provide professional assistance to the business community. These include accounting, advertising, and legal firms, as well as management and consulting firms. Their philosophy in a nutshell: for firms such as these, people in particular, the most talented people, the "stars"-are a company's greatest asset, and "aligning" those key employees' career and life needs with the goals of the company will pay huge dividends, both figuratively and literally.

Aligning the Stars, like most books of the genre, is relatively short and is written to be easy to read and digest. The idea's the thing. Still, the book is buttressed by years of research into how leading PSFs attract, retain, and motivate the best people. Lorsch and Tierney studied firms as diverse as IBM Consulting, Goldman Sachs, and Ernst & Young to determine the common attributes that helped them succeed.

The authors are authoritative voices from two different parts of the business world. Lorsch, a professor of human relations at the Harvard Business School, cofounded an executive education program at the school called Leading Professional Service Firms (the only such university-based program focusing on PSFS). Tierney comes from the practice side, a director and former chief executive officer of the management consulting firm Bain & Company. Since 2000, he has chaired the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit affiliate of Bain & Company that he founded to provide consulting services to foundations and nonprofit organizations.

Boiled down, the book is a recipe for managing people who don't need managing in an old-style, top-down way.They need to be guided, the authors say, and the company's culture must be shaped in such a way as to encourage behavior that redounds to the benefit of the firm. "The result," they write, "is a paradox, which is the central management challenge facing professional service firms: On the one hand, firms need to manage their partners.... On the other hand, the idea of`managing' partners is an oxymoron. An old joke says it all: managing established and experienced lawyers (or creative directors or consultants) is like herding cats."