[Book Review] Purple Your People

‘Get the people stuff right!’ boasts this book – pledging tips to happier, more inspired people. You’d be forgiven for expecting your standard self help stuff, but no; the language of this book is rooted firmly in the cut and thrust of hard business.

It’s the kind of book you imagine the CEO’s of the wannabe ‘next Google/Facebook’ would carry on their person at all times. The blend of hard-hitting business material and cheery ‘positive thinking!’ stuff is on the whole well balances, although the superhero job advert analogy did make me chuckle.

The book’s best merit is probably in its layout – it looks really slick and well compiled from the start. It’s all well bullet-pointed and interspersed with lots of pop-out boxes and the like, you get the sense this highly visual methodology plays well into the pro-active overtones of the whole book. Its greatest downside? The way the whole book reads like one massive advert for Learn Purple itself and their 'friends' (various companies that form in-depth case studies throughout the book)

After all, this is a system based on profound change and action – every page of this guide is about targeting problems – or more specifically areas of improvement – and finding solutions. In its strive for perfection it can all come across as rather domineering, bulldozing right through with no room for stragglers – but you get the sense the ideal market for this book would have no qualms with following the letters of this book to a T.

Of course, by extrapolating an existing ‘improvement system’ into a book format, the tendency to pick and choose what bits you want to use is tempting, but while this methodology would often work with other similar guides, you get the sense it wouldn’t here. In Purple Your People, the strict overtures of business are absolute. For a fairly ‘out there’ guide (just look at the title!), the language of business is laid on pretty thick.

The lasting impression is of a system where you are very much either in or out, and it’s something reflected in the overall readability of the book itself.