(FORTUNE Magazine) – Oh, sure: It would be easy to make fun of gurus.

So let's get started.

Their claim to sympathy looks thin. In recent years their advice has loosed a plague of fads--upsizings, right-sizings, downsizings--precipitating layoffs in the tens of thousands. ("I don't know that I'd say layoffs," muses Michael Hammer, reengineering's chief proponent. "I'd say 'dislocations.' I never envisioned reengineering would be about layoffs.") Meantime, gurus themselves have never looked happier or better fed. Their pelts are sleek.

Says Ur-guru Tom Peters of the fees he and his peers command: "It's humorous, absurd. All of us sort of slide in behind whoever is the hero du jour--a Colin Powell or a Thatcher, who can get $75,000 a speech. You pray for a war, so Schwarzkopf will boost the market up 15%."

Gurus do not, strictly speaking, have homes. They have estates. In Tuscany. Or in Vermont or Pebble Beach or in all three. When creativity guru Edward de Bono convenes seminars, he has hosted them on his private island off Venice. Gurus decant their own wine.

Who, then, living in Scranton (and not, probably, decanting his own wine) really needs to read another word about them? I mean...why get all worked up?

Just take the following short quiz. Below are titles of new business books. Which are real? Guess right, and you likely already know (or can infer) everything worth knowing about the present state of gurudom and can skip this story.

--It Doesn't Take a Giant: Haile Selassie on Leadership, edited by James Nevelson (Free Press, $22.50). Memoirs of the late Ethiopian monarch tell how anyone of any size can hold power seemingly forever.

--The Wisdom of Wolves: Nature's Way to Organizational Success, by Twyman Towery (Wessex House, $14.95), which includes the wolf credo: "Respect the elders; teach the young; cooperate with the pack; play when you can; leave your mark."

--Make It So: Leadership Lessons from Star Trek: The Next Generation, by Wess Roberts and Bill Ross (Pocket Books, $22).

--Bursting Into Flame: Drive Your Company as if it Were a Huge Dirigible, by Max Pruss and Dr. Hugo Eckener (McGraw-Hill, $12.95). (Asbury Park Sentinel says, "Oh, the humanity.")

--Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior: A Commando's Guide to Success, by Richard Marcinko (Pocket Books, $20). An ex-Navy Seal's ten commandments for business, beginning with: "I am the War Lord and the wrathful God of Combat. I will always lead you from the front, not the rear."

Well?

Anyone who thinks all these titles are fake hasn't visited the business and management section of a bookstore lately. (Anyone who thinks they're all real has maybe spent too long there.) For every tome by Harvard heavyweight Michael Porter, there are four from guys touting birds, ninjas, or something that comes in sevens. Not only is the wolf book (for example) real, it's going into its second printing. As for the Rogue Warrior (the guy who'll never lead you from the rear), he sat comfortably for months on Business Week's best-seller list. Star Trek? Real.

Quietly, without fanfare, the advice business has been hijacked. New gurus armed with nothing more than pens, podiums, and a tremendous shamelessness have co-opted what used to be a nice, wholesome calling: dishing out sound advice to business men and women.

Sometime in the 1980s, the domestic bonds between advice and soundness began to fray. Then in the 1990s, advice, like a Gibson Girl gone bad, flung down her apron, wrestled herself free from kindly old Peter Drucker, and ran off with a succession of sweet-talking, diamond stickpin-wearing, be-boatered fancy men.

Today, as books like those above attest, no advice is too lame to get a polite, respectful hearing from a business audience.

"I can talk about the trends, and how things are changing," explains management consultant and wolf authority Twyman Towery. "I can go through industry cycles--and I've got great slides--but when I get to the wolves, when I show those creatures going along, one after the other--the reason they do that, through the snow, is because the first wolf, he breaks the snow, so it's easier for the others. And then when he gets tired, he just drops off to the side and the next wolf takes his place, and the former lead wolf goes in behind, where it's easiest. And they do that for a hundred miles a day like that; it's teamwork. And the audience--you can just hear the audience sigh."

I bet.

I asked Twyman, as politely as I knew how, if anyone had ever suggested this was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard.

"Ha! No, but I'll tell you what I did get, though: a woman who said she didn't want to support anything to do with animal rights."

Does he really make a living at this, going around talking about wolves to business? "Yes, I do four speeches a month at $4,500 a speech--about all I have time to do."

Rare is the CEO who hints (much less declares, as Rupert Murdoch did when asked by the Economist which gurus he admired) that most of this advice is worthless. Said Murdoch: "You go to Doubleday's business section, and you see all these wonderful titles, and you spend $300, and then you throw them all away."

Advice's debauch might not matter, were not larger trends at work: The public's hunger for guidance (as measured by sales of how-to books) is running at an all-time high. And what obtains on Main Street holds true higher up: It's not just the Lompoc Commerce Club that's inviting in the wolf experts, it's mainstream CEOs--and higher. The First Lady may not have conferred with Mrs. Roosevelt, but her husband most definitely conferred with fire-walker and peak-performance guru Tony Robbins--at Camp David, no less. (Ike had better be buried on frictionless bearings.) So open has the national mind become to new ideas that it might as well be porous.

Eager to shovel in still more stands a guru army. The highest-ranking ones tend to be white, middle-aged men, with a smattering of Indians and Asians. The corps has few prominent women, except for Rosabeth Moss Kanter and one or two others (then there's a sheer drop until you hit trend-caller Faith Popcorn). Most gurus are academics gone Hollywood: In the cradle of a Harvard or a McKinsey, they learned to lisp advice; but eventually, like all gurus worthy of the name, they burst free from their institutional shells and emerged refulgent, as individuals.

How many are there? Albert Vicere and Robert Fulmer, professors of management at Penn State University and the College of William & Mary, respectively, have attempted to divine the shape of gurudom. By their estimate, upwards of 31,000 gurus now ply the trade worldwide, commanding daily fees that range as high as $10,000--and higher. As they say down at the U.N.: Good golly, Mr. Ghali!

How ever did the U.S. get through World War I, the Depression, World War II, and assorted other dislocations without benefit of counsel from this caste? Why do we so believe we need it now?

Gurus, naturally, have plenty of ideas. Tom Peters notes the U.S. has never been entirely guru-free. There is something deep within the U.S. breast, he thinks, that dearly loves an all-purpose expert: "What isn't new here is the whole Chautauqua thing: We're the only society in the world that believes it can keep on getting better and better. So we keep on getting suckered in by people like Ben Franklin and Emerson and Drucker and me."

In the 1940s, Peter Drucker advanced the idea that management was a profession, and that like medicine or law it possessed a proprietary core of wisdom, which needed to be husbanded and blown upon, as if it were a glowing coal. Larval MBAs appeared--steeped in theory and willing to be steeped some more. They met. And met, and met. The age of meetings had begun. Michael Hammer here takes up the story:

"The rubber-chicken circuit? In politics everybody's heard of it. But there is one in business too. IBM started it--everybody having conferences." What did those conferences need? In one word: fodder.

A bore? A mere celebrity? A baggy-pants comedian? "They'd all do fine for after dinner," Hammer says. "But who are you going to hire for during the day? The demand is for what I call respectable entertainment. You want somebody you can tout as a guru, somebody who can kill some time, amuse the customers."

This primacy of amusement I discovered for myself in May, when I attended a Tom Peters seminar in Tampa. Making small talk with others at my table (people who'd paid up to $445 apiece to attend), I asked whom else they'd seen or heard recently on the circuit who'd impressed them. A woman to my right named somebody I didn't recognize. "He's a magician," she explained. Like my other seatmates, she exuded an attitude best described as: Hey, this sure beats working.

The best gurus never forget they are headliners, often sharing a bill with other acts a client has retained. For those who do forget, reminders come during the social portion of a seminar, when a guru finds himself poolside enjoying cocktails with others on the program--a ventriloquist, say, or a cocker spaniel that can howl "La Marseillaise." Reminisces Michael Hammer: "I remember when I was just breaking into the business ..." He stops, smiles, shakes his head. "I sound like an old comic."

By the 1970s, every ingredient essential to what we now know as gurudom existed. And yet some vital spark was missing.

It came, finally, from Japan.

And it was fear.

When the Japanese began beating the pants off U.S. business, domestic managers' confidence began to wane. Prevailing wisdom prevailed less and less. A new attitude emerged: Somebody, somewhere, knows how to do business--but it isn't us. Also, its corollary: Hey, let's invite in a bunch of experts and find out how smarter people do it.

Before 1982, says Tom Peters, nobody really gave a tinker's damn about benchmarking. "We thought we knew everything," he says. "But by 1982 we believed that we knew nothing." A book co-authored by Tom appeared that same year--In Search of Excellence--and with it gurudom took wing.

In Search Of's huge success (1,000,000 copies sold within the first 11 months) was unprecedented. For starters, says Harriet Rubin, executive editor of Doubleday's Currency Books (publishers of Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline and many another hot business book), "it created a whole new audience of readers--men. It was the first such book to bring men into bookstores in big numbers." Second, it made its authors enormously rich. Royalties from hard-back sales alone made Peters a millionaire. Being a guru looked like awfully nice work. Suddenly every disgruntled B-school professor in America wanted to be Tom. "I hear," he says with vast amusement, "that six people at HBS went into psychotherapy because they were so upset that somehow I didn't deserve this."

Aspirants perhaps lacked Tom's showmanship, his hubris, his gift for drama. ("Two aspirins and an apple a day won't cut it!" he tells his Tampa audience, warning of "millennial" changes bearing down on them. The last 20 years were "a battle between the fat guys--Germany, Japan, and the U.S." Now 6.2 billion new workers from Asia are about to crash the party. "And guess what, Tom?" he asks rhetorically--coatless, pacing, rolling his hands in a rochambeau gesture--"They aren't all making sandals!") Humbler talents nonetheless clambered aboard the circuit, eager to explore the new world Peters pioneered.

What they found--and find today--is a commercial faerieland, rich in usufructs. Royalties from books? They're just a tributary to the real river of dough. Dan Burrus, a second-tier guru and author of several books, including Technotrends, views books merely as "a spearhead" for marketing other products, including newsletters, videos, and consulting services. "There's big money there, definitely," he says of consulting. A speech may earn him only $17, 000. Consulting generates $25,000 a day, plus opportunities for "stock and equity positions" in the company that hired him. Still, before he and his peers can dip into this gravy boat, they need the name recognition that comes from lecturing. Says Harriet Rubin: "Many people write books just to get onto the circuit."

She should know. What Schwab's Drugstore was to Old Hollywood, Rubin's office at Doubleday is to New Gurudom. From a throng of sweater girls, Rubin seeks the future Lana Turners. Lecturers send her 20 or more tapes a week, hoping she will take them on as authors. They know she's worked magic in the past.

It was Rubin, for example, who guessed that business audiences would sit still for an English poet reading them Beowulf. The jacket blurb to David Whyte's hit book The Heart Aroused describes him as "one of the few poets to have taken his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development." Says Rubin: "David is in vast demand now. Of all my unlikely geniuses, he's the most unlikely to have succeeded on the guru circuit."

She tried recently to enlist Las Vegas lion tamers Siegfried & Roy to author a book on management. With an almost straight face, she explains: "If one can control wild beasts, one can run a business. The word 'manage,' after all, comes from maneggiare--to tame the wild horses." That deal ultimately fell through, but she since has signed Roseanne Barr-Arnold-Thomas for a crotch grabber you could imagine being titled How to Get Things Done the Roseanne Way.

Rubin regrets losing touch with another potential management author: a dominatrix. "It was fascinating. She didn't dominate her clients, exactly. She had learned that you can dominate people only in ways they give you permission to dominate them." (If this project ever gels, we've got the title: Ouch! I like it!: How Market Leaders Learn to Love More Discipline.)

I asked if she had ever heard of an institution out in California that my father and I had just returned from visiting--the Ehama Institute (see box). The name at first didn't seem to register, so I described the place: a training facility high in the Santa Cruz mountains, with tepees and a fire pit, teaching ancient tribal management techniques and presided over by two American Indians, Rainbow Hawk and..."Wind Eagle," interjected Harriet. "Yes, of course, I had a proposal out to them six months ago."

Is it any wonder the world continues to rush in, eager still to mine the rich lodes Tom Peters first laid claim to? In what other profession are barriers to entry so low? Here, really, there is just one: The Big Idea. Each aspiring guru needs a B.I.; and anyone who wants to stay in the game needs a succession of them.

Happily for gurus, these ideas have not (until recently) had to amount to much. Says a top ten guru with undisguised disdain: "Intimacy with the customer? The virtual corporation? These aren't exactly ideas to make your head hurt. It's not that they're wrong, it's just that they're not any big deal." John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, authors of The Witchdoctors, an examination of gurus due out in late October from Times Books, totally agree. Says Micklethwait: "Most books by gurus are nothing more than a magazine article massively dragged out."

But drag they must, since books are the circuit's price of admission. No sooner does a guru dot the i's in one book than he's embarking on another.

What can Twyman Towery's readers expect next?

"Oh, probably the same type thing. I've found so many people--so many women, especially--are interested in dolphins. You know, people actually take retarded children and put 'em in tanks with dolphins, and they come out smiling. We don't know how their communication works, but it does. And the Berlin airlift."

The Berlin airlift?

"What's good about America! The Berlin airlift--how we had a plane landing every three minutes, without a fatality, and kept the city alive." (My personal advice? Go with the airlift. That way, Twyman won't run afoul of Laura L. Laaman's new book, The Dolphin Dynamic, whose jacket starts: "The waters of today's business world are teeming with sharks ...")

Yes, teeming. After 15 years of newcomers pouring in, gurudom is finally getting crowded.

Not only is there competition for big ideas, as this example illustrates, but competition for illustrations is tight. Every big idea, once staked out, must be illustrated by vivid, compelling, and (most especially) original examples--the 11 companies that have achieved unprecedented restroom cleanliness, or some such. Even here, gurus are running into poachers.

"It happens," sighs Michael Hammer. "There're a lot of people now, and each has his own set of favorite companies." Until recently it's been a nice, semiproprietary relationship: A group of companies retains a guru's consulting services; and the guru, in turn, gets to use the companies' experiences as illustrations. But intruders are being discovered in the woodpile: "Progressive Insurance!" says Hammer irritably, remembering one such predation. "I found that somebody else was talking to them." Here, a battle between bull-gurus mercifully was averted when Hammer discovered that the poacher intended to use Progressive to illustrate a point different from Hammer's own.

A specter is stalking gurudom: the paucity of good ideas. Consider this analogy to the diet industry: Once the four words "eat less, exercise more" have been uttered, what more, really, is there left to say? Everything else is just embellishment. Gurus who cannot discover a new truth must dress an old one in new clothes, reaching ever deeper into novelty's trunk.

Like Oakies arriving late to California, new gurus are finding all the low fruit already picked. (Scene: As the Joad family truck crests the Rockies, Walter Brennan raises himself up painfully from a bed sewn together from old copies of Publisher's Weekly: "Yessuh, I hears as how, out in Califerney, they got these multi-city tours. They got consulting contracts, long as here to Frisco--big, fat, juicy ones too--so's the juice runs down yeh chin!" [Sadly, he will not live to see this.])

Not only is fraternal competition on the upswing, but worse: The natives are getting restless. Consumers have begun to guru surf. Nowhere is this trend seen to better advantage than at the periodic meetings of the Institute for Management Studies, a national association that, for a modest annual fee, allows member companies to hear the gurus sing.

At IMS meetings, members trade catty, insider gossip about gurus they've hired or are considering hiring--both outsiders and ones within IMS's own network . Here are a few characteristic comments, with names withheld to protect the guilty:

"He's unreliable, cancels dates if he gets a better offer; I wouldn't use him."

"A terrible implementer, but he's good at getting people interested. If that's your purpose, then it's $40,000 well spent."

"Not so swell. Very smart but no podium manner. Came with toys. But that's all the audience got--toys."

"He's great but too preachy. Formulas all over the board. I said to him: Fella, you've got to get out of MIT more often!"

So, gurus have their cares and woes. Theirs is not a weed-free bed of roses. Seeing their struggles, hearing the cruel and mischievous things said about them behind their backs, I grew curious to know how their Original Old Adam--Tom Peters--was faring. Was he, too, weighted down with miseries?

I found him at his Vermont farm in May, resting up from the rigors of a 28-city tour that in one week (covering three cities) had netted him at least $100,000. Additional revenues from consulting, books, videos, and a newsletter are just so much more balm. Says Tom: "It all adds up."

Has he noted with dismay the changes roiling his profession? "I really don't think about it." Does he feel, perhaps, the hot breath of Tom-wannabes singeing the small hairs on the back of his neck? "I really don't give a shit." On this lovely day, Tom is thinking about his new book-in-progress, tentatively titled Rules for Radicals, in which he's distilling the observations of some 30 years into crisp bullet points.

For the clever and the energetic, being a guru will ever remain one heck of a business. I contemplated this truth as I bade Tom goodbye. I'd asked if I might tour his property, and he'd said yes, recommending I climb the hill behind his barn so as to see his swimming pond and sap house (the building where maple syrup is produced in early spring) to better advantage. Beside the pond I found a folding chair, placed so that a sitter could best enjoy the view. I settled into it.

What a view! Gazing out over the gables of Tom's 11-some-odd buildings, I beheld, many miles away, the local peak--Mt. Tinmouth--and, stretching luxuriously between it and me, a valley green with grass and dotted here and there with buttercups. In that valley, I imagined, dwelled other clever people--maybe even people who decanted their own wine.

A swell setup. A life a guy could learn to like. Why, if there were an ice cream parlor down there in that valley, it would have to be the Norman Rockwell kind, where a cop is forever buying ice cream for some young adventurer. Hmmmm. Norman Rockwell...Norman Rockwell. Stuff Your Turkey or Somebody Else Will Stuff It for You. No, too seasonal. Lounge-Chair Manager. That's better. And maybe I could work a tie-in of some kind with La-Z-Boy. How about Fish Ponderings: Think Like the Biggest, No Matter Where You Swim. That's good. And sap? Seven Sappy...? No. Wrong tone.

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Amy Kover