SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CAREERS : MAKING IT WORK : A New Age Dawns at the Office : More About Soul, Less About Salary

Forget the billionaire founder of Wal-Mart and “Sam Walton: Made in America, My Story.” Don’t buy “Iacocca: An Autobiography” unless you can get it for under a buck in the bookstore bargain bin. As for “Get Better or Get Beaten”--get real.

Takeover tales, billionaire bios and how-tos founded on fear are out, replaced by management meditations like “Zen and the Art of Making a Living.” “Zen” bills itself as “a practical guide to creative career design,” a “career guide for human beings.” Says the preface: “It’s really a book about love in action, about joy, about beauty, about caring.”

OK, so your boss doesn’t define work as “love in action” and likely would not suggest a group visualization exercise to kick off the next staff meeting. Still, a quick peek these days at the business section in any bookstore--or the seminar roster at corporations from IBM to AT&T--will; get you more about God and less about greed, more about the soul and less about statistics.

Age has hit America’s corps of corporate baby boomers, causing hopes to dim and hair to dull. Downsizing has replaced growth. For the first time, this generation’s universe is finite. In an era of lowered expectations and a search for a different kind of success, “spirituality” and “business” are no longer oxymorons.

“Finally people aren’t laughing at me,” says Carol Orsborn, author of “How Would Confucius Ask for a Raise: One Hundred Enlightened Solutions for Tough Business Problems.” Orsborn reads the I Ching along with the Wall Street Journal and is a leading proponent of spirituality in the workplace. “People are taking this seriously.”

“This” is the belief that you don’t have to put away your heart when you pick up your briefcase, that the universe is a caring place that will take care of you if you let it, that life is cyclical, that trying harder and working more can cause more harm than good.

“Though more and more is being written about the need to apply spiritual principles in the business environment, we often have little idea of what spirituality looks and feels like,” Orsborn says in “Confucius,” which is her often-funny effort to answer that question.

Problem No. 51 is an odd one for Eastern philosophy: What to do about a very Western IRS audit. Nonetheless, Osborne manages an artful I Ching answer that runs to three pages. Problem No. 80 gets a much less mystical response. Problem: “I’ve got a full-time job that saps so much of my energy that there’s nothing left in me to pursue my life’s passion: sculpture. What can I do about this?” Succinct solution: “Get a part-time job.”

An earlier Orsborn book called “Inner Excellence: Spiritual Principles of Life-Driven Business” was turned down by more than a score of publishers in the late 1980s. In contrast, “Confucius” was the main selection for the Fortune Book Club in June and was one of the Book of the Month Club’s best selections in July.

When “Inner Excellence” was being ignored, says Patti Breitman, Orsborn’s agent, “it was the message they were turning down. The message was you don’t have to put your spiritual self on hold when you go to the office. I don’t think the world was ready for that then.”

It may be now. A slender fable originally self-published in 1988 and called “Zapp! The Lightning of Empowerment” has sold more than a million copies. Authors William C. Byham and Jeff Cox hope to re-create the success of their tale about the troubles and triumphs of the fictional Normal Company in Normalburg, U.S.A, with the more recent “HeroZ: Empower Yourself, Your Co-workers, Your Company.”

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Decanted to its essence, the advice given in most Tao-based business books can sound a tad simplistic without the lengthy historical and philosophical discourse given by most authors. The books in general are based on Eastern-flavored positive thinking, visualization, relaxation, faith and the giving up of control over all aspects of one’s life.

In fact, the necessary faith and optimism are perhaps the biggest stumbling blocks for our oh-so-rational world. “If you don’t have faith, you end up turning the business environment into a war zone,” Orsborn says. “Business becomes about survival. . . . If you aren’t willing to take at least that leap of faith (that the universe is benevolent and has an order of its own), you have to wonder what’s going to get you out of bed tomorrow.”

Hurdles aside, there is a growing market for this new crop of old ideas filtering into the American workplace, says Steven Piersanti, president of Berrett-Koehler Publishing, which specializes in books that link soul and salary.

“Work has taken center place in our lives,” Piersanti says. “People are starting to want more meaning out of it. More than just a paycheck, they want fulfillment. . . . So the traditional business literature has been expanding.”

The New Age of Business Literature does more than answer questions like: If a tree falls in the forest, would Georgia-Pacific hear it and turn it into a cardboard box?

Jerry Lynch, co-author of “Thinking Body, Dancing Mind: TaoSports for Extraordinary Performance in Athletics, Business, and Life,” likes to tell the story of how the Tao Te Ching, an ancient book of Chinese wisdom, helped a Silicon Valley middle manager get a Manager of the Year award.

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“When people would make mistakes or have a failure, say, in writing a proposal or making a product, he would reward anyone on the team who would find a solution to the problem,” Lynch recounts. “He had fantastic response. What it does to the people is they’re more relaxed when working because they know they’re not going to get written up. When you’re relaxed, you’re more creative.”