Does becoming a more productive worker make you a better human being? Illustration by Richard McGuire

“Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business” (Random House) is Charles Duhigg’s follow-up to his best-selling “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business,” which was published in 2012. The new book, like its predecessor, has a format that’s familiar in contemporary nonfiction: exemplary tales interpolated with a little social and cognitive science. The purpose of the tales is to create entertaining human-interest narratives; the purpose of the science is to help the author pick out a replicable feature of those narratives for readers to emulate.

What enabled the pilot to land the badly damaged plane? How did the academic dropout with anxiety disorder become a champion poker player? What made “West Side Story” and Disney’s “Frozen” into mega-hits? All that was necessary, it turns out, was one key tweak to normal mental functioning or group dynamics. “Mental models” helped the pilot land the plane. “Bayesian thinking” transformed the basket case into a winner at cards. An “innovation broker” brought “West Side Story” together, and “Frozen” became the highest-grossing animation film of all time because of a principle known as “intermediate disturbance.”

Other tweaks on offer in “Smarter Faster Better” include “creating disfluency,” “a bias toward action,” “SMART goals” versus “stretch goals,” and the concept of “psychological safety.” There are a few mind-sets to avoid as well (side effects may include crashed aircraft and the Yom Kippur War): “cognitive tunneling,” “reactive thinking,” and an exaggerated disposition for “cognitive closure.” Basically, the good stuff boils down to organizational buzzwords like “lean,” “nimble,” “flexible,” “innovative,” and “disruptive.” Negative stuff has to do with mindless routines, mechanical thinking, and the need for certainty.

There is not much to disagree with here, and that is one of the intriguing things about the genre this book belongs to. Not dozens or hundreds but thousands of titles like “Smarter Faster Better” are published every year, and they account for a disproportionate percentage of total book sales. Yet they mainly reiterate common sense.

Does anybody think it’s unwise to be lean, nimble, and innovative? Who needs a book to know that rote behavior and fear of uncertainty are not going to take us very far? It’s not startling to learn that organizations that nurture a “culture of commitment” are more productive than organizations that don’t, or that setting ambitious objectives can jump-start innovation. “People who know how to self-motivate, according to studies, earn more money than their peers, report higher levels of happiness, and say they are more satisfied with their families, jobs, and lives.” I can believe that. “Determined and focused people . . . often have higher paying jobs.” I won’t argue. “An instinct for decisiveness is great—until it’s not.” An impregnable assertion.

Probably the most famous book of this type is Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” which was published in 1936 and has never gone out of print. It is reported to have sold more than thirty million copies. I can tell you the lesson of that book in one sentence: If you are nice to people, they will like you. You just saved yourself sixteen dollars. (Not to spoil the reading experience, but the lesson of Duhigg’s previous book, “The Power of Habit,” is: Replace bad habits with good ones.)

As always, of course, the question is not What would Jesus do? but How, exactly, would He do it? Being super-nice to everyone is a virtuous aim, but, for most of us, it’s actually not that easy. Similarly, life’s unpredictability is universally acknowledged, but people get anxious anyway. The promise of books like “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and “Smarter Faster Better” is not to tell us what we should be like but to give us tools for becoming that way, devices to get us from our native diffidence and clinginess to where we already know we want to be, friendly and adaptable.

So Carnegie didn’t only preach niceness. He provided tips for being nice. “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language” is one of his “Six Ways to Make People Like You.” (I can tell you from experience that this is true only if you know how to pronounce it correctly.) Duhigg’s advice is less concrete: “Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control,” “Envision multiple futures,” and so on. But the idea is the same.

These all sound like ways to help you feel better about yourself, and maybe even be a better person. But the books are not beauty products for the personality, and that is not the reason people buy them. Most functioning people are probably O.K. with the personalities and temperaments that the Good Lord or natural selection has given them. They’ve learned work-arounds for their grumpiness and fretfulness. What they’re worried about is how others see them and, specifically, how employers see them. The clue to the real purpose of these books is the section of the bookstore you find them in. They’re not in the psychology section, and they’re not in with the diet and exercise books. They’re with the business books.

This is because books like “How to Win Friends” and “Smarter Faster Better” are essentially applied management theory. They try to sum up current thinking in the business world about “human resources” and transmute it into a manual for self-improvement. People don’t read these books to find out how to be better human beings. People read them to figure out how to become the kind of human being the workplace is looking for.

A great deal of the appeal of the books, and what makes them fun to read, is the exemplary-tales part. Duhigg’s are cleverly written, and in a detective-story style. This feature dates back to the very beginning of the genre, Samuel Smiles’s “Self-Help,” published in 1859 (the same year as “On the Origin of Species”). “Self-Help” is a commodious compendium of exemplary tales, the stories of (almost exclusively) men who have made it in nearly every imaginable arena of human endeavor. One chapter has a discussion of great potters.

For Smiles, the key ingredient of success is perseverance. (Smiles was a Scotsman.) Josiah Wedgwood wasn’t smarter or more privileged or even luckier than the rest of us. He just kept at it. The important thing about perseverance is that everyone has it, or can potentially have it. For the premise—and the selling point—of these books is the insistence that the game is not rigged. If the prize is out of reach no matter what you do, there is no reason to improve yourself; writers like Smiles, Carnegie, and Duhigg are here to tell you that the prize is within reach. You just need to persevere, smile, tweak, get up an hour earlier in the morning, practice TM—whatever it is.

We buy the books because, deep down and until the universe compels us to admit otherwise, we all believe this about ourselves. When I was twelve, I was sure that, just by putting my mind to it, I could become a star basketball player. I would have bought any number of books offering to explain the secret ingredient of athletic success. I was eventually obliged to concede that factors beyond my control made basketball stardom unrealizable. Basically, I never had a chance. The game was rigged, in favor of people with, well, talent. Still, no one wants only what is there for the taking. What would we be if we didn’t try?

The key ingredient, the replicable feature of all success stories that explains why some people do better than other people, is not arbitrarily chosen. It reflects the nature of the economic times. When Smiles published his book, in the laissez-faire era of industrial capitalism, the novel feature of contemporary life for the sort of person who bought books like “Self-Help” was economic and social fluidity. Upward mobility was newly possible for many people, but so was downward mobility. Many of the novels of Smiles’s contemporary Charles Dickens are illustrations of the latter. Smiles made the case for diligence and dedication as the ticket upward.

Smiles was distressed when readers complained that “self-help” meant selfishness, or the pursuit of self-interest, and, in a later edition, he explained that “the duty of helping one’s self in the highest sense involves the helping of one’s neighbors.” This was not wholly coherent, and when the book came out it didn’t matter, because in a laissez-faire economy the pursuit of self-interest is a virtue. There’s nothing wrong with it; on the contrary, it’s supposed to be what makes markets work. (“On the Origin of Species” described the natural world similarly, as a place consisting of, at bottom, nothing but organisms single-mindedly pursuing reproductive success.)