One Friday night last year, a mom and a dad and their 7-year-old twins were making Jiffy Pop while brainstorming about how to brand their family. This was no idle exercise. At stake was the sanity of the parents, Linda Rottenberg and Bruce Feiler.
Getting their daughters out the door in the morning was a daily disaster. Their evenings--trying to feed the girls, bathe them and scramble them into bed--were no better. Traditional parenting guides served up advice that struck Feiler, a best-selling author, as tired and outdated. He started poking around elsewhere and found that the world of business management...