Book Review: Corporate Punishment

I hadn’t heard of James Ado­nis until I picked up his book, “Cor­po­rate Pun­ish­ment: Smash­ing the Man­age­ment Clichés for Lead­ers in a New World.” From the start, that con­cept had me on the hook. I guess I’ve heard about “low hang­ing fruit” one too many times.

The book is made up of small chap­ters sev­eral pages long, each ded­i­cated to a par­tic­u­lar man­age­ment cliché. It’s one of the things that I really liked about this book. Such small chap­ters makes it easy to pick up the book for a few min­utes, then come back later.

That’s not to say you want to put it down, though. James has a won­der­ful way of blow­ing tired old clichés out the win­dow with his vivid writ­ing style. He uses great exam­ples from his own life, and a lib­eral dash of metaphor. The result is a seri­ously engag­ing col­lec­tion of ideas that chal­lenge con­tem­po­rary thinking.

Each cliché in the book is art­fully dis­sected. The book really helps to change the way you think about man­age­ment. That’s what I found most impor­tant about this book – it inspires you to think, and think dif­fer­ently. That alone is worth many times the cover price. If you are a man­ager of any kind, strongly con­sider buy­ing Cor­po­rate Pun­ish­ment on Ama­zon.