The first quality to appreciate about The Monocle Guide to Good Business is the complete absence of those irksome front cover winning business slogans, management idioms and horrendous illustrations that are the bane most business books. The second quality is the book’s aesthetic with the linen cover and its gold foil treatment lettering providing a winsome combination. Also tactile, the differing high quality paper used throughout make this a book that you want to touch and feel while you read. Classic Monocle design at its best, those familiar with the magazine will realise that they are in for a veritable treat.

With business and entrepreneurship one of Monocle’s abiding themes since the magazine’s inception in 2007 this is a guide to what good business actually looks like. It doesn’t give the reader false promises or magic formulae for monetary success, nor any patronising and overbearing management speak. It is simply a superlative and supportive business reference. From perusing The Monocle Guide to Good Business it is obvious that it is just as concerned with quality of life as with good business acumen where the emphasis is on finding and achieving a sense of fulfillment and a more human approach to running a business.

Those interested in pursuing a new venture, principally their real calling in life, will see themselves somewhere in the pages of this book. Offering an element of escapism from life’s daily rigours, giving the dreamer in each of us that “maybe one day” moment, The Monocle Guide to Good Business also shows the reader how to do things well. The photography throughout can only be described as beautiful which adds to heightening the reader’s sense of awareness as well as their affinity towards the many real people with real businesses that are depicted throughout the book’s 300 pages. There is an unfeigned feel-good dimension, made all the more prominent by the use of fun illustrations.

Altogether, The Monocle Guide to Good Business is about doing things well and creating a business fit for every individual’s particular needs. It is a call to arms, a wake-up and a shake-up, to be read from cover to cover, or to dip in and out of. It coaches the reader and promotes experiential learning, preferring to eschew a didactic slant. In telling the story of good business in a visual, restorative and rousing manner, The Monocle Guide to Good Business gives one much splendid food for thought.