Book Review - The People Principle

The People Principle, by Ron Willingham. Subtitle: a revolutionary redefinition of leadership. Willingham owns a very successful sales and customer service training company, and I've seen his training packages in a couple client sites. As you might imagine, I read LOTS of books like this, and unfortunately for Mr. Willingham, I am probably way too discerning. This book was terrible. It certainly wasn't revolutionary. Don't buy it, even if it gets 4 and a half stars on Amazon.

[Full disclosure: I was predisposed to not like this book, but read it anyway in a spirit of being fair and open to my own narrow-mindedness. The reason I was predisposed was that Mr Willingham's coaching model was not impressive. At one point in his COACHING model, he says that you should then "COACH", without saying what that means. It was weird. Many who were using it at a client came to me and said, "I'm supposed to use this tool, but I can't figure it out. Can you help?" There are lots of bad coaching models out there, and so I don't mean to pick on him. And, I really like some of his customer service stuff.]