Book Review – The Pocket Guru by Guy Browning & Janet Brown

In the world of the Powerpoint presentation, the world has to be available to us in small bite-sized chunks of information. Unfortunately, there are a lot of very capable business books in the market that take hundreds of pages to make their point. In a lot of cases, our lives are cluttered enough with routines, lists and stress to make reading these books near impossible. And even if we had the chance to read them, we might not grasp the theme in a first sitting.

This is where “The Pocket Guru” by Guy Browning and Janet Brown comes in. They have written a book subtitled ‘Priceless Nuggets of Business Wisdom’ that tries to explain business to you. In doing so they have created a book that is colourful, focussed on bullet point answers to all the questions and situations that you might find yourself in.

This is not to say that it is a clinical, tired looking and stuffy. To pick on a random page (all un-numbered so you have to dip in and out), the ten bullet points entitled ‘Risk’ is set inside a picture of a sharp-toothed jaw. The one for Natural Leadership has a cartoon of two hippopotamuses entitled ’Follow Me Follow’, echoing the Flander’s and Swann song ‘Mud, Glorious Mud’.

“The Pocket Guru” is a funky, modern and ambitious title that attempts to deliver a lot of guidance in a series of snappy lists, and I think that it does this effectively in a way that engages the reader. Its seven main themes (Business Basics, Smooth Operations, Personal Training, Managing People, Communication, Getting Ahead and Moving On) keep the narrative fresh and doesn’t dwell on any subject too much losing the readers interest.

More importantly, this restricted list approach makes the whole book cover a lot of ground to give the reader sufficient salient information to allow them to progress their understanding.

Have you enjoyed this review? If you have, click through and buy the book HERE!