Given the runaway success of Who Moved My Cheese? a wave of wannabes was inevitable. It has begun. In What the CEO Wants You to Know: How Your Company Really Works, Ram Charan tries to imitate the breezy simplicity of Who Moved My Cheese’s silly parable about how businesses and people deal with change. But don’t bother, even if you liked Who Moved My Cheese?; What the CEO Wants You to Know is nothing more than a primer of basic business knowledge that will leave even tyros muttering "no kidding" after turning too many of its 128 pages.

Here are some of the principles that Charan treats as revelations:

Understand how your company makes money.

Put the right people in the right jobs.

Watch the competition, anticipate demand, and spot trends.

Treat your customers like royalty.

Keep inventories low and profit margins wide.

To back up his all-too-obvious principles, Charan resorts to cliches or reductionist logic. Consider this: "Cash gives you the ability to stay in business. It is a company’s oxygen supply." Or: "In today’s world, no growth means lagging behind in a world that grows every day."

Even when Charan heads into territory that might be enlightening, such as the overwhelming importance of cash flow, he pulls up way short. He writes: "Smart businesspeople know that generating cash can help grow the business. Invested wisely, cash improves the company’s money-making ability." But that is all he says. We get no hard-core examples, no profiles of someone who has mastered the intricate art of generating and investing cash, and no analysis.

We are told that General Electric Chief Executive Jack Welch "has mastered the relationships between cash generation, margin, velocity, return on assets, growth, and customers." That is what Charan calls "getting a picture of your company’s total business." But, again, there is no elaboration, from Welch (even though Charan has consulted for Welch) or from anyone else.

It is one thing to lecture—Charan is a former professor at Harvard Business School and Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, so he does a fine job of lecturing. It is another thing to offer interesting case studies, fresh insight, or at least entertaining anecdotal evidence about what has and hasn’t worked. Charan does none of those three things. Instead, as evidence for his principles, he notes that Chrysler, Volkswagen, Citicorp, and Montgomery Ward all ran into cash-related problems during the past 20 years; that Westinghouse and Digital Equipment are as cold as the Klondike; and that Wal-Mart Stores makes "terrific use of shelf space." Didn’t we know all that?

In a rare, fresh example, Charan bestows one of his platitudes on Ford Motor. He lauds President and CEO Jacques Nasser for "building relationships with, and, therefore, retaining customers, [which] costs less than having to continually attract new ones." To Nasser’s credit, Charan writes, Ford bit the bullet during the Bridgestone/Firestone exploding-tire crisis. Last August, Nasser ordered the recall of 6.5 million tires used on Ford Explorers. "He realized that while Ford’s money making would suffer temporarily, customer safety would have to come first." This was a fine and gutsy act, but Charan again belabors the obvious by drawing this conclusion: "After all, without customers’ trust, the rest doesn’t matter."

The one area where Charan’s basics might be worth applying is the Internet sector. Charan’s tenets were ignored in favor of blind faith and attention-getting stunts, such as the one pulled by the CEO of Beyond.com, when he showed up in his boxers for an interview on cable channel CNBC. (No, that colorful tale isn’t in the book.) Even though the Internet sector would be fertile ground, Charan devotes a scant four paragraphs to it. His less-than-bold conclusion: The Internet sector "is evolving."

With nothing in it to make the text entertaining or illuminating, Charan’s book drives home the basics at a water-torture pace. The book would work much better as a wallet-size card with Charan’s fundamentals of business printed on one side. On the other side might be an inspirational quote, such as "Let’s play two," which Chicago Cubs great Ernie Banks used to say. Or, perhaps Johnny Carson’s observation that his success "just evolved from working hard at the business at hand each day." The quotes on the flip side could easily be more important than what Charan has to say.

Croson teaches e-commerce strategy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He can be reached at crosond@wharton.upenn.edu.