My fellow blogger The Thinker, who is currently chair of the Fabian Society and writes a very good political blog, is in real life Paul Richards, an accomplished PR consultant. Technically I suppose Paul is a competitor since we both provide PR and communications consultancy to public sector organisations such as social housing providers and local authorities.

However, I do want to commend him for writing The Neighbourhood Renewal PR Guide which is available free from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's website. I've only scanned it so far and haven't had a chance to read it thoroughly but on the surface it provides an excellent working document for non-PR professionals who are tasked with the responsibility of managing the PR and communications for organisations tasked with neighbourhood renewal briefs.

One of the great things about a PDA (I have a Palm Tungsten T) is that you can store and carry around dozens of useful and interesting books to peruse whenever you have the odd five minutes between meetings.

For me one of these texts is Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Despite being written more than 3,000 years ago it still contains many useful insights into conducting business, public relations or politics in the modern world.

At some point in the near future I'm going to try and create a NetworxPR branded PDF copy of it for people to download for free.