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It has been a heady time for "it guy" authors Malcolm Gladwell, James Surowiecki, and Thomas L. Friedman. They've broken through, pumping up both the business best-seller list and their profiles. But their success is probably due more to the fact that none are strictly "business" authors: They've resonated in the corporate world because they offer a set of new lenses to peer through. With only a handful of these books on the shelves, though, what to read while waiting for a new biz blockbuster? We went back to the shelves to find four sleepers that could have been the next Blink but never reached their tipping point.

Emergence [ Scribner, 2001 ] By Steven Johnson

Slime molds, stock markets, city sidewalks--even the most chaotic systems take on a degree of order if you step back far enough. Steven Johnson's Emergence is about understanding complex organizations by deconstructing them into their simplest components.

The twist here is that Johnson, author of last year's Everything Bad Is Good for You, doesn't focus on systems with top-down hierarchies. He's into organizations that evolve from the bottom up, anything from neighborhoods to Napster.

Or anthills, which have fascinated and baffled scientists for years. Despite her name, the queen isn't actually in charge; no one is. So how do individual ants know whether they should be gathering food or taking out the trash? Johnson calls it "swarm logic," which he defines as assessing a global system by way of local information. By receiving chemical signals that show who's doing what at any given time, ants know when to reassign themselves to other work.

What Emergence boils down to is a quest to understand why the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts. It's a provocative journey, one in which software learns how to "procreate" and questions such as "Are we [genetically] more like a socialist housing complex than an ant colony?" don't sound out of place. Johnson brings logic and reason to his research, and his vivid examples ensure that the theory of emergence will color readers' thinking long after they've finished the book.

•Gladwellian prose: 3
•Surowieckian reason: 3
•Friedmanian foresight : 4

Candyfreak [ Algonquin, 2004 ] By Steve Almond

Roughly 100 years ago, there were 6,000 candy companies in the United States. Today, there are about 150, most fighting for scraps left behind by three conglomerates: Hershey's, Mars, and Nestlé. According to author Steve Almond, a self-described (and aptly named) "candyfreak," the big three want "hegemony over the average American mouth." Almond sets out to discover what happened to the era when each town had its own brands and its denizens enjoyed "a surge of sucrose-fueled civic identity." What he finds is something we've seen before: more mergers, less choice. Over the past 50 years, small-time candy makers have been gobbled up or forced out of business by mass-market realities.