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Too many business books read like a first cousin of 'The Joy of Cooking': "Do you want to whip up an appetizing future? Then follow these step-by-step recipes for success, complete with tasty anecdotes to add some spice." But two recently published books ditch that warmed-over approach. Both "The Visionary's Handbook: Ten Paradoxes That Will Shape the Future of Your Business" by Watts Wacker, Jim Taylor, and Howard Means (HarperBusiness, $26), and "The Soul at Work: Listen, Respond, Let Go" by Roger Lewin and Birute Regine (Simon & Schuster, $26), argue that the old recipes for success no longer work. So how is it possible to secure the kind of future that we want for ourselves? By reveling in the paradoxes, contradictions, and tensions that define the present. "We live today inside a continuous collision of opposites," write the authors of "The Visionary's Handbook." "This is a book about recognizing and living with those collisions: not avoiding them, because no one can."

Coping with collisions is a central topic in each book. In "The Soul at Work," Lewin, a science writer, and Regine, a developmental psychologist, present the basics of complexity theory and then offer a series of richly detailed narratives on how nine organizations apply that theory to the strategy and structure of their businesses. In "The Visionary's Handbook," futurist Wacker, business strategist Taylor, and professional writer Means go on a free-spirited romp through the economic and cultural landscape: They examine everything from why Oscar Mayer hot dogs cost so much at airport terminals to how the Discovery Channel outflanked National Geographic. Why do the authors of both books draw on such a wide variety of material for their stories? As Lewin and Regine write, "You can't figure out what to do in the future by looking at how you did things in the past."

Paradox Principles

The first book that Watts Wacker and his colleagues wrote together, "The 500 Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next" (HarperBusiness, 1997), grabbed readers and shook them vigorously. But "The Visionary's Handbook" grabs readers by the hand and takes off running. The authors don't just expound on the forces that are changing our culture; they offer exercises that can transform readers into forward-thinking provocateurs. Having success in the future, Wacker and his two colleagues write, means "managing the paradoxes that manage you."

The first major paradox in the "Handbook" involves a challenge: living and working in the present and the future at the same time. The authors of the book dub this phenomenon "pressure tense" -- a mode in which present and future combine, creating stress for those who are unable to juggle them both. How do you sustain a business while also planning to dismantle, cannibalize, and otherwise hack away at it in the coming years? Or, as the authors of the "Handbook" succinctly put it, "How do you bet on your vision of the future and allow yourself to survive in the present?"

One solution, they suggest, is to create something called a Fool Box -- a space in an organization where people are free to pose any question or suggest any idea without fear of retribution. Those who step into the Fool Box (whom the authors like to think of as medieval-style jesters, offering up riddles, conundrums, and other twists on reality) can be employees or consultants. And, in a world of paradoxes, their purpose is to "embed contradiction in your organization by being certain that someone inside it is living outside it, beyond here and now, carrying your story line out five, ten, twenty years."