by AbdulRazzag Alharbi ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 2022
Smart and methodical advice; especially applicable to those just starting their careers.
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This debut guide suggests applying a marketing plan model to career development.
Alharbi, a former manager at Saudi Aramco and co-founder of two paper industry companies, believes a corporate marketing plan can also be important for a person seeking a career. If an individual does not follow the same strategy, writes the author, “you will end up in a recurring cycle of trying to find a job, then finding a job in which you try your best to align with the employer’s plans, then leaving the job or staying without achieving the growth you desire.” The idea has merit; Alharbi follows through by first using an example of a company owner who wants to market a product, showing how a business plan should be devised. The plan covers situation analysis, marketing goals and strategies, tactics, implementation, and control/feedback. For those unfamiliar with developing a marketing-focused plan, this is a brief but solid primer. The author then proposes a “Career Marketing Plan Template” that essentially adapts the strategy for personal use. The remainder of the book cleverly illustrates how that plan can be developed and implemented. For some, making the leap from promoting a product to packaging themselves as a marketable commodity may be challenging, but Alharbi guides readers through a carefully structured process. Using a real example of a young man who set a goal of becoming the president of a company, the author shows how one can develop a vision at a very early age by using “strategic thrusts” to support that idea, leading to concrete goals and tactical objectives. Next, the author moves on to analyzing the employment pool, assessing the “competition” (other candidates for a position), creating a personal value proposition, and marketing one’s skills and experience. Alharbi spends considerable time discussing the implementation of a career marketing plan and offers helpful suggestions, including how to assess feedback from others. Most chapters include questions to answer and exercises. The result is a clearly written, intelligently packaged, systematic approach to career development.
Smart and methodical advice; especially applicable to those just starting their careers.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-398-43808-8
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
by Matthew Desmond ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2023
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
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New York Times Bestseller
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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