Ditch the management books and go to the cinema – this is the latest advice from four Italian management consultants who have issued a handbook called Cinema for Managers.

The 50 recommended films range from Stephen Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004) in which Tom Hanks “devises a ground-breaking strategy for survival” and Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate (2004) to Volver by the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, in which Penelope Cruz “fulfils her dreams” and uses her femininity “to handle working relationships and motivate her team”, reports The Times.

Speaking to the paper, Francesco Bogliari, a lecturer in management and economics in Rome, who edited the handbook, said: “All good films teach us lessons about human behaviour. Movies are not just after-hours entertainment.”

He cited the American economist Edmund Phelps who, after receiving the Nobel Prize for Economics last year, said that cinema had been one of his sources of inspiration.

According to Bogliari, lessons can be drawn from all films. Classic Westerns, continues the paper, starring John Wayne are not just frontier tales of cowboys and Indians but lessons in “leadership, mission and loneliness at the top.”

Bogliari says that executives heading off on summer holidays should abandon the books and pack a few movies.