As academic books go, this one is dense and intimidating. I'm not a particularly slow reader, but in this text, each 30-40 page chapter would easily take me several hours to read. Nonetheless, I found this book engaging and compelling. Rather than approaching the topic of management from a research or scholarly perspective, the authors treat this book more as a practical field manual for managers (that just happens to be informed by research).
Each chapter begins with a skill assessment (some of which were on-line and would be tied to a class if one were reading this text in school) and then moves on to a learning section, describing management theories and skills. The learning sections are not footnoted which keeps the reading free of distractions. But the references section in the back is massive, so you know that Whetten and Cameron have done their homework. The chapters cover topics ranging from "managing stress and well-being" to "motivating others" to "building effective teams." The final section of each chapter includes practice and analysis, sections which often includes case studies and scenarios.
If you're looking for a book to help you start thinking about what it means to be an effective manager of people, this could be a good place to start. It's think and dense, but if you read it a chapter at a time as I did, it's well worth the investment.