For the last several weeks I have been thinking as much about Aristotle as about Santa Claus. For this I blame James O'Toole, whose personal take on Aristotelian ethics, Creating The Good Life*, was published last year and ended up at the top of my pile of books to read over the holidays.

By any standard other than his own, Jim O'Toole has enjoyed a glittering career: Rhodes scholar, business school professor (at the University of Southern California), management consultant (with Booz Allen Hamilton), author of a dozen management books with homes in San Francisco and Malibu. Yet, as he confesses in the opening pages of Creating The Good Life, a nagging dissatisfaction remained. Why had he never achieved the guru status of his friends, Tom Peters and Warren Bennis? Why were his management books never reviewed in the FT? Why were his material aspirations never satisfied?