Does ivory-tower language help sell a business book? Or would younger first-time or middle-management employees rather be bitch-slapped into herding their underlings into productivity? We’ll know more this month when Bare Knuckle People Management: Creating Success With the Team You Have—Winners, Losers, Misfits and All (BenBella Books) hits the proverbial bookshelves.

Authors Sean O’Neil and John Kulisek go way beyond the subtitle’s “losers” and “misfits.” Some highlights of the unabashedly colorful vocabulary in the book intro’s first paragraph include phrases like “why the hell,” “you blew past performance hurdles,” and “you were plucked to manage a group of poor slobs struggling to survive in the very job in which you thrived.”

It gets better. How about this, also in the introduction, to describe what the fledgling manager is up against: “You’ve tried whipping them [the people who now report to you]. You’ve tried hugging them. You’ve tried drinking with them. You’ve tried micromanaging them. But the results are too slow in coming.”

And take a look at the list of the authors’ 16 workplace profiles, whose monikers include: Badass, Steady Eddie, Noodler, ADHD Butterfly, Needy Ned, Mr. Inappropriate, Burnout, and Retread. (For the record, ADHD Butterfly is a tag, not a description of a real person with attention-deficit disorder.)

What made O’Neil, a principal owner and CEO of One to One Leadership, a sales and management training firm in Pelham Manor, New York, and Kulisek, president of the Norben Group, a sales and marketing company in Hackensack, New Jersey, think this in-your-face blunt-speak was a good idea?

Let’s start with their disdain of hugs.

“We wrote it for the younger, less touchy-feely generation,” says Kulisek. “Frankly, a lot of managers today are over the top with their hugs.” O’Neil, a licensed social worker and former practicing attorney who used to be “a big hugger,” discovered that many managers thought the bear-hug-embrace strategy was a crock.

“People don’t really talk to each other in the ways described in those traditional business books,” says Kulisek. “We may be a little over the edge, maybe even for shock value, but that’s how people speak to each other.” And, adds O’Neil, they both felt younger professionals would resonate more with business information written in this style.

The book is targeted to frontline managers—men and women in their late 20s and early 30s newly promoted to managerial roles and who often have had no formal business training. In other words, people thrust into commandeering the behavior and production of the very people they used to hang out with as equals—sometimes even like family.