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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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