Not that long ago, trendy and hip business practices were based on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Victory should be the objective and harsh discipline the norm. The latest BusinessWeek magazine outlines some basic principles from Sun Tzu: Greed is good. Be tough. Attack only when victory is likely. Beat the enemy. Winning is essential and requires clever tactics and, sometimes, deception.

Ah, but that may be changing. According to the BusinessWeek article, the latest business fad is based on the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu text based on the wisdom of Lord Krishna. Here it is important to focus on your thoughts and actions rather than the outcome. Greed is bad. Be fair. Act rather than react. Seek higher consciousness and be sensitive to shareholders, partners, employees, and neighbors. Feel the Karma, y’all?

Frankly, I find the latter approach more to my liking, perhaps because I got a belly full of the former while in the Army. In any case, I find it amusing to see these business fads come and go while some simple truths remain constant - not the least of which comes from Johnny Carson’s old sidekick Ed McMahon: “Honesty is the single most important factor having a direct bearing on the final success of an individual, corporation, or product.”

All this philosophical stuff makes me thirsty and my Karma says I should go get a cold beer.

Last week was the 25th Annual Banned Books Week sponsored by the American Library Association and several other book selling and publishing associations. If you are thinking “so what?” then you might want to heed the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas: “Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”

In case you think these challenges arise from one particular segment of the political spectrum, think again. Challenges are just as likely to come from the liberal left as they are from the conservative right. As author Nat Hentoff writes: “the lust to suppress comes from any direction.”

Granted, there are some tomes I might find inappropriate for any number of reasons, but I would never tell anyone else that they couldn’t read them. Along with some challenged authors whose topics might make me uncomfortable there are also any number of others I have enjoyed. John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and Maya Angelou come to mind.

In case you’re interested, the Top 10 banned classics are: “Ulysses,” “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Madame Bovary,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Of Mice and Men,” “Brave New World,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Moll Flanders,” and “Candide”.

If you want to learn more, go to www.ala.org. Printers should be very interested in such things.