Getting going with a new business requires a lot of creativity and business initiative. Perhaps the key word here is "differentiation" - not calculus, not even rocket science, but making you and your business different from the competition. Otherwise, why should a customer choose you?

This is a great collection of ideas and suggestions to help a new business get off the ground. We do need to get one slight objection out of the way first. The average age of someone starting a business is 40 - but this gives the impression of being aimed at late teens and 20-somethings. For instance, there's a chapter titled "What you think all the guns is for?" (sic) which includes the remark "In business, attitude is all about having bags of confidence, not bling." Yeh, right - business development according to Ali G. Frankly this is a bit condescending - you have to be prepared to look around it (luckily it's not all like this) to get to the good material underneath.

There are 52 short chapters (handily one a week if your mind works well with that sort of structure). Apart from the main text there's a here's an idea for you box to try out straight away, try another idea that links to another of the sections, defining idea which is a relevant quote and how did it go, which gives guidance when it hasn't worked out properly for you. To be honest, the defining ideas weren't particularly inspiring, but that last section, how did it go, is a brilliant concept - not original, but (as I'm sure the authors will tell you) creativity isn't always about being original, and having a "how to fix it if it didn't work for you" bit is superb.

One other slight moan. The layout of the book (a series standard) is very stylish, but it suffers from over-styling on the page. There are too many irrelevant illustrations that don't show you anything but are just there to set the mood, and the text is too busy - they would have been better to have had the same amount of text with about twice as much white space. But this isn't a serious problem.

Overall a refreshing and excellent addition to the business startup bibles. At the moment not available directly in the US, but it only costs a few dollars more to order it from Amazon.co.uk and have it shipped across.

If this is of interest, check out our "The Chameleon Manager" which is about the changes you need to make to you and the way you operate if you are going to build a business around yourself, as any successful startup must:

THE CHAMELEON MANAGER: immerse yourself in the new skills that managers (and everyone in employment) will need to cope with the new world of work, where the job for life is a joke. Establish your personal dream portfolio and make it happen.