If you want to know why Achilles was lucky, what to do if you become an “accidental manager” and how even positive stereotypes can backfire, the answers are in three recently released workplace books.

The most fun of the three is “Magic Words @ Work,” a collection of about 50 anecdotes and cautionary tales from authors Howard Kaminsky and Alexandra Penney that avoids buzzwords and has such catchy headings as “Achilles Was Lucky” and “The Two-Stone Solution.”

In the Achilles anecdote, Penney describes how a magazine editor asked her to write a story with the premise that — with the legendary exception of Achilles and his heel — almost everyone has more than one flaw. But what people do, the editor said, is pick one fairly innocuous weakness and ignore the others.

“One chef initially confessed to an unwillingness to share his Chinese food when eating out with friends, and then, asked to try again, admitted that he really hated having women in his kitchen,” the authors write. “There was the woman copywriter who coyly revealed an aversion to sharing taxicabs and then, pressed, admitted that she recycled gifts she didn’t want and gave them to her staff at Christmas.

“So what is the point of these Magic Words? They’re a reminder that if we’re like most people, we’ve chosen to acknowledge a fairly harmless flaw and may be letting something far more serious get in the way of our success.”

In “The Two-Stone Solution,” the authors offer a tale from a man named Bert who works in the pest control business: A young worker named Curtis got a call from a woman who was convinced there were animals living in her attic. He put out traps, but didn’t catch anything. Even when he used stronger bait, he had no luck.

Meanwhile, the smell in the home was getting worse.

A frustrated Curtis finally told Bert he was going to bring a slingshot with him on his next visit, figuring he would even resort to a primitive solution if he saw the annoying creature. But Bert told him not to let the woman lead him to the attic on his next visit. Instead, Bert said, check out the oven.

“When he’d opened the oven door, he’d almost passed out,” Bert told the authors. “There was this stinking remnant of a 2-week-old roast chicken. I said, ‘Curtis, always carry two stones. One for the problem people think they have, the other for the problem you take the trouble to find.’”

A different sort of trouble is outlined in “The Accidental Manager,” Gary Topchik’s book that offers advice for new managers. But my favorite anecdote has to do with how poorly companies train potential successors.

Topchik describes how a utility company’s intranet manager named Shelia developed expertise, but she never passed it along to anyone else. Then she got a lucrative job offer and bolted.

“The irony I that this utility company had to hire Shelia back as a consultant, on weekends, at an exorbitant fee, to train a few of her former staff members how to run those features of the system that previously only she had been responsible for,” Topchik writes. “Shelia, and the department, hadn’t built up their equity. That is, they were not developing other staff members to learn the skills that Shelia had.”

As for how even positive stereotypes can backfire, author Sondra Thiederman offers an anecdote in “Making Diversity Work,” describing how a gay man named Michael got in trouble with his female boss for not fitting the “all gay men are artistic” stereotype.

“This came as a blow to Michael’s boss, who asked him to redecorate their small offices,” Thiederman writes. “The boss was angry when she learned that Michael had hired an interior decorator and couldn’t understand why he hadn’t just done it himself. Michael ended up looking bad, not because his boss held a negative view of gay men, but because she had the positive bias that Michael had an interest in redecorating the office himself and the skill to do the job.”