Hyperion, $10.95

Review by Emily Looney

(CNN) -- This book was recommended to me by a friend whose advice I respect, which goes to show books are a good thing for good friends to disagree about.

"The Path: Creating Your Mission Statement for Work and for Life" falls short of the mission set forth in its title. It offers some useful ideas, but in my view, these do not add up to a comprehensive method for forming one's professional or personal objectives.

Laurie Beth Jones, also author of "Jesus, CEO" and "Jesus in Blue Jeans", writes in a pronounced religious vein that at times seems rather personal in viewpoint.

She mixes scripture and biblical stories with a handful of "P.C."-feeling references. Consider this: "Sometimes the memory of who we 'were' in heaven before we 'are' on earth lingers through childhood." As a lifelong Episcopalian, I don't recall ever hearing such in church.

This means "The Path", with a promotional blurb on the cover promising relevance "to Christians and nonbelievers alike", is not certain to be found relevant on the basis of religion, whatever a reader does or doesn't believe.

The first part of the book tries to make you articulate your mission. It offers a simplistic, step-by-step formula to cheer you on.

There are some good suggestions, such as writing down your mission and keeping it short, but it gets too hokey. For example, Jones forces a list of self-respecting verbs to appear in what she says is a candlestick shape on each of several successive pages.

"It is the verbs we choose to act on that shed light on who we are," she explains.

The list is alphabetized, so who knows what other perfectly nice verbs you don't get to choose because they would have, um, blocked the light of this visual metaphor (which actually is hard to see).

It gets somewhat better in the second part. After offering "The Eight Action Steps to Success" -- presented in the absolutist vein of advice books as "the" eight -- Jones tries to illustrate how these steps figured into the success of some significant Judeo-Christian figures.

Jones' eight steps are reasonable in themselves, though hardly a full or one-size-fits-all answer or approach.

And it's engaging to read about spiritual giants (such as Moses) as confused people needing their era's equivalent of career counseling (and for that matter, the burning bush is pretty absolute advice, too).

But when Jones applies her steps to the stories, it reads like she's fitting her ideas to them more than finding her lessons in them. For example, while it's good to suggest the merits of thinking creatively about old business contacts, it struck me as rather silly to think Joan of Arc was "turning old business into new business" as she revitalized the French army.

With its overall superficiality, I would suggest "The Path" is unlikely to guide you very far.

The book, printed in hardback and paperback, apparently has some wider appeal I'm missing. Perhaps its style simply wasn't for me. If you want to read it, do so with patience and discernment, and it potentially can offer some merit as one reference among many.

Which, now that I think about it, is probably more or less what my friend was thinking, too.

Emily Looney is an editor at CNN Interactive.