A business coach presents a guide to networking for the reluctant.
In this debut, Hollick makes a strong case for the value of learning how to network with others in professional and personal contexts. She offers concrete, actionable strategies for improving one’s social skills and making networking an enjoyable practice. In concise chapters, the author guides the reader through exercises in self-awareness, explains why networking is useful and how to approach it with the right mindset, and then introduces specific techniques for on- and offline interactions, maintaining relationships over time, and finding mentors. A final section explores the role of networking in the workplace. Many chapters include guided tasks, such as a detailed plan for strengthening a LinkedIn profile. Hollick is a solid writer with an energetic voice (“Let me repeat that. Anything that creates, freshens, or strengthens relationships for you is networking for you”), which makes her book an easy, enjoyable read. The information is solidly practical, and she offers citations as well as in-text shout-outs to books that she found most informative during her own networking education. The book’s enthusiasm for LinkedIn as a tool for building connections may not resonate for readers from communities that are less engaged with the site, but it constitutes only a small portion of the text and can be easily skipped. The remainder of the book is well organized and substantive, full of examples of how to establish mutually beneficial acquaintances, how to use networking to find out what lies ahead in one’s workplace, and how to get valuable help from colleagues without seeming too eager. Novices and experienced workers looking to strengthen their skills will find useful insights in these pages.
A thoughtful and detailed self-help work.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73294-590-6
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Rizers LLC DBA Orinda Vista Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
Did you like this book?
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
Did you like this book?
Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
