Product reviews for Sex, Leadership and Rock'n'Roll

It sounds like an odd recipe for success. Peter Cook started life in pharmaceuticals, leading innovation teams to bring multimillion dollar drugs to market and international trouble shooting. He is now the Managing Director of Human Dynamics, offering strategy facilitation, coaching training, practical MBA programmes. Yet he has just written a book that uses one of the most self-destructive businesses as a metaphor for personal and corporate success. Yet he uses it to excellent effect. One aspect of business success is reinvention and learning. In one section of the book he compares this to leading brands like the Beatles that reinvented themselves several times in their career, or like Madonna who reinvented herself by changing members of her supporting cast. The lessons, Cook says, are simple. Learn to change rapidly by acquiring new skills and knowledge and dump what you don't need. It sounds a long way from some drunken rocker smashing up his hotel room, but then from chaos can come creation.