From interns to CEOs, this sage manual will improve professionals’ communication skills, confidence, and careers.
A guide offers advice to help readers take control of their careers.
Advanced degrees and technical skills are often touted as the keys to professional success. But, as Oldford explains, reliance on the wrong types of achievements can cost readers time and money on the road to promotions. Meanwhile, the real secrets to accelerating a career are often the unspoken benchmarks against which performance is measured. Referring to these tenets as “Ghost Rules,” the author reveals the hidden path to success in a concise and insightful guide. Covering an assortment of relevant professional topics, Oldford provides wisdom for maximizing workplace visibility, receiving appropriate credit for achievements, managing time effectively, and developing a signature brand. Based on the author’s own experiences, the book is thoroughly practical and occasionally unexpected. Challenging readers to think carefully about the purported benefits of remote work, company hopping, and advanced degrees, he advises professionals to examine the specific benefits of their choices before blindly following trends. And while some of his advice—such as the importance of punctuality—may seem obvious, the author’s recommendations should yield results if consistently applied. Offering a sharp contrast to complex and theoretical business guides, Oldford’s manual is easy to read and ready for immediate application. Designed to be broadly relevant for all stages of the workforce journey, the book intersperses suggestions for day-to-day success with tips for mapping out a professional future, recognizing a stalled career, and determining if it’s really necessary to find a different company to join. Moreover, the author presents step-by-step instructions on the creation of a “Career Management Document,” daily stakeholder reports, “Career Accomplishment Worksheets,” and other materials that will give readers a competitive edge. A useful companion to other professional resources and worthy of successive readings, Oldford’s guide provides readers with a tool that will help them achieve their career dreams.
From interns to CEOs, this sage manual will improve professionals’ communication skills, confidence, and careers.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 979-8788975696
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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