Five years ago Julie Bell and Donna Brown had both had enough of their marriages. Their husbands, Phillip and Dave, were jobless and useless, loafing miserably around the house all day, drinking too much and rarely addressing a civil word to their wives or kids. Meanwhile, Julie and Donna, who are both United Airlines executives in Chicago but at that time scarcely knew each other, were climbing the corporate ladder, working 60-hour weeks.

But life was so unhappy at home that instead of looking forward to returning in the evenings, they dreaded it. “One day I decided I couldn’t go on like this any more, so I kicked Phillip out of the house,” says Julie, now 32. Unbeknown to her, Donna, 42, had reached a similar crisis point in her marriage and booted out her husband too. Both women viewed this as the first step towards a divorce.

“As far as I was concerned, the relationship was over,” says Julie when I meet her and Donna at an Italian restaurant in Chicago one evening after work. But within weeks, Phillip and Dave were both seeking reconciliations. “I said ‘No way’,” says Julie, whose job title, scarily, is director of continuous improvement. “But Phillip insisted he was willing to do whatever it took. So I sat down and, using the tools and processes I had learnt from work, drew up a list and said ‘Here’s the deal, this is what you have to do’. And, to my amazement, he started to do it.”

Donna, director of corporate human resources, also decided to use her workplace strategies on her husband, but more subtly. “I knew from my business skills that when you’re trying to shape a performance, you don’t want to deliver a list that is insurmountable. You want to focus first on the things with high impact that are achievable.”

The checklists included everything from “Become Self-Sufficient” to “Become a Domestic God”, and their tactics were so successful that within a year both husbands were allowed to return home. When their mutual boss discovered this coincidence she urged them to write a book describing how they applied their boardroom skills to managing their husbands. Last month The Scorecard: How to Fix Your Man in One Year Or Less was published in America and since then the women have been appearing on nationwide talk shows and receiving rapturous reviews from readers on Amazon. “If only my husband and I had access to this book when we first got married,” writes M. Heath from Connecticut. “It would have been so much easier for us to develop the communication and financial skills that help make a good marriage.”

A male reader is less impressed, dismissing it as “pure misandry”.

“I don’t think even we realised what a true phenomenon we were on top of,” says Julie. Despite being ten years younger, she seems to be the leader of the pair, doing more of the talking. On the surface both women appear easy-going and giggly but there is clearly a steeliness within.

In the book, Donna and Julie encourage women to draw up a “gap analysis” for each area of their lives, ie, the gap between what they have and what they want. Devising a scorecard — a performance management tool used to determine the health of a business — they apply it to what they see as the nine key areas of any marriage (see below). Each card, which includes every item that matters to you, is divided into four categories, or a “four-block” in business speak, depending on how important it is and how dissatisfied you are. So in their example, under “Love: Become an Involved Father”, they list 30 requirements ranging from “Make school lunches” (important, dissatisfied) to “Schedule kids’ haircuts” (not important, but still dissatisfied) to “Help arrange childcare” (important, satisfied).

They realise that everyone’s list will vary but suggest that each woman compiles a list of what is important to her. My favourite comes under “Celebrate: Become a Believer in Ritual”, which includes the requirement “Help Build Family Gingerbread House” (important, satisfied). Clearly a vital component of any marriage.

Each item is then addressed with a step-by-step programme: prioritise, filter, analyse, plan your approach, measure results. They stress that it is not a prerequisite to boot your husband out before you set about fixing him. “That is the last place you want to be,” says Donna emphatically. “But if your relationship is so broken that that’s the next step, hopefully this book will show you how you can come back from there.”

Julie agrees: “In our cases, there were some serious, serious issues. We didn’t kick our husbands out just because they weren’t taking out the trash.”

They say that they fully expected their book to be controversial. “Men don’t want to be fixed,” explains Donna as she digs into a plate of veal escalopes and spinach. “It’s like a surgical procedure for them.”

“Here’s the thing,” says Julie. “Can you really change people? Yes. Can you force them to change? No. But you can create the circumstances and environment to motivate them.”