Punk Rock People Management

One of the joys of doing occasional training in creativity is that I get to meet some great people, and one of the most remarkable I've had the pleasure of working alongside is Peter Cook. Peter combines business training and rock music (not always at the same time) - can't be bad.

He has just come out with a book on managing people (primarily from an HR perspective), taking what he describes as a punk rock approach. You've got to love it for the cover alone. Inside, he takes key areas of dealing with staff and gives them a serious working over. Often the 'punk rock' approach involves stripping out all the fancy stuff and getting back to basics, which is why the chapters are just double page spreads. Frankly a lot of this stuff is much simpler than HR professionals would have you believe - and Punk Rock People Managment is excellent at showing where the Emperor's New Clothes are in action.

The best news is that, at the moment the book is free in PDF format. I downloaded it to my iPad where it was an easy read in Apple's ebook reader. But if you don't fancy an ebook, you can also buy a solid version.

If you have to manage people, it's well worth taking a look. It's not as transformative as Ricardo Semler's Maverick, which I think is just about the best business book ever written, but there's a lot of common sense and cutting away the deadwood.

And did I mention it's free?

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