M. R. Young, L. Young. Radcliffe Publishing Ltd price £27.99; pp 120 ISBN

9781846199882

Developing your dental team's management skills: the Genghis Khan way, published in 2013, has been designed specifically to be used together with a previous resource published in 2010 called Managing a dental practice: the Genghis Khan way. Apparently, the publishers have called this bundle 'The Genghis Khan way' books, considered to be 'ideal for developing a happy team and a successful dental practice'.

Before going further, it should be pointed out that the first book became the 2011 winner of the Diagram prize for the oddest book title of the year. The publisher has tried to explain away the use of the notorious 'Genghis Khan' in the book title; 'Although some in the West see him in negative terms, the Mongol leader created one of the world's greatest empires. His hugely successful strategies included intelligence gathering, understanding his rivals' motivations, being quick to learn and adopt new technologies and ideas, and successful people management'.

From the title alone, one can tell that this text provides training of management skills for the staff of the dental practice. Having used ring-binding and relatively large font size, the book is presented as a training manual. The first lesson is called 'What is personal development planning?' The next three sections have headings of: preparation, people and planning.

Most of the lessons are concerned with 'understanding'. For example, under Section 1: 'Preparation', the title of the lesson is 'Understanding – what is management?' Within Section 2: 'People', there are seven lessons consisting of: two lessons on patients, four lessons on the employee, and one lesson on the practice manager. The third section 'Planning' covers legal and regulatory framework, mission statement, objectives, strategic planning, business plan, quality, planning for disaster, policy and procedure, and managing change.

Each lesson contains outcomes, background reading and activities. For obvious reasons, there are a lot of background readings based on the contents of the authors' first book. Other background reading involves internet search on related topics. Activities include open discussion, small group brainstorming on case study, working in pairs to devise a plan or prepare a presentation.

Overall this is a very hands-on training manual that requires members of a dental team to give dedicated time and efforts to acquire the management skills.