Losing your job has an immediate impact on your financial situation. If you have some warning about redundancy or dismissal you can put some financial plans in place to cope. If you are already out of work you may feel the need for a more radical approach. So what are the practical ways you can
Is your manager making unreasonable demands? Are you bored by unproductive meetings? Do you feel undervalued? Maybe it’s time to break the routine and become your own boss
Are you stuck in a job that really doesn’t suit you? Do you long to reinvent yourself professionally? A career overhaul can seem a daunting step but, with careful planning, you can achieve those unfulfilled ambitions
Does the thought of being cooped up in an office all day fill you with dread? If so, a career relating to either the built or natural enviromnent could be your ticket to a life in the great outdoors
Mark Zaleski, 37, is senior vice-president of area operations for US online grocery company Webvan. The firm, which has a net income of more than $231m, is currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a national delivery infra-structure with the aim of becoming the dominant door-to-door retailer in America. Zaleski lives in the heart
Astrally projecting itself to the top of the bestsellers list in 1994, The Celestine Prophecy became the must-read of the management and business leadership world. A self-help book-cum-novel-cum-historical myth, The Prophecy encourages its reader to lead a more spiritual life through the discovery of nine ‘insights’, supposedly based on those discovered in an ancient Peruvian
Summary The core theme of this book is Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, otherwise referred to as TOC. Goldratt argues that manufacturing has for too long focused on producing, ignoring what is demanded by the market place, i.e. demand and capacity. Goldratt believes that one should balance flow through a system to meet the demand of
Summary Navigating Complexity collects together for the first time the ideas and language of a recent development in management theory – complexity theory. The command and control approaches to management ‘no longer hold true’, complexity theory asserts. The theory states that any system contains built-in unpredictability, that every system is comprised of many components and
Corporate identity is rarely described as sensuous or emotional. Buying a product is rarely considered an organic experience. Yet Robert Jones soon makes us feel comfortable with these terms as he launches an impressive argument for the importance of ‘feeling’ in the 21st century marketplace.
Thirty goals in 63 international matches for England, a remarkable average of more than 20 goals a season in the Premier League and a league championship medal for unfashionable Blackburn Rovers – you’ve definitely done well for yourself. But could you do better? Your decision to quit international football after the European Championships in the
Freud first coined the term ‘wrecked by success’ to explain the recurring phenomenon of people who appear to throw away their best chance of happiness through self-inflicted damage. Maximum Success, written by two Harvard business psychologists and executive coaches, cleverly elaborates 12 different patterns of self-defeating behaviour and ways of tackling them. Take the hero
Summary Handy’s book is a groundbreaking philosophical and practical guide to the inevitable changing ways of organizing work and the workforce. Handy starts from the viewpoint that radical change is not only desirable but essential, if economics and society are not to be irreversibly damaged. The book focuses on the necessity of becoming more creative
Summary Management consultant Bob Garratt told us that he wrote his latest book as ‘a counterblast to myopic thinking’ among senior managers in the quest for company efficiency. Garratt shifts the focus away from the current vogue for downsizing and cost cutting, towards a value-system that preserves and encourages employees at all levels. Get employees doing
Summary In 1979 journalist Keith Waterhouse was commissioned by his editor at UK national tabloid the Daily Mirror to write an instruction manual for the newspaper’s new recruits. The result was a booklet that became an instant success, with half the hacks in Fleet Street trying to beg, borrow or photocopy what had started as
According to 3COM 65% of people who bought a Palm Pilot told the firm they heard about it from another person. People rely heavily on personal recommendations and as customers grow more skeptical towards advertising, Palm Pilot deliberately created a sense of something special when it showed its product to a select group of executives
Summary The academic and consultant Andrew Brown has selected six key elements of leadership that, he believes, illuminate the secrets of great leaders. Illustrated with countless examples of leaders from history and today, The Six Dimensions of Leadership, first published in 1999, tackles in 200 racy pages the six qualities in turn: heroism, acting
Summary In the introduction, the authors admit that this book was turned down by countless publishing houses with the objection: ‘Who cares? Who wants to read about techies pissed off at their jobs?’ Co-author Bill Lessard says he is a ‘living testament to the fact that most Internet careers are nasty, brutish and short’. So,
Summary Goffee and Jones – the BBC director of human resources – reject the assumption of some business books that the character of a corporation is a uniform, single concept. They see it as complex and multiple-faceted. Every firm is composed of several cultures, they explain. These are fluid, liable to change, and are sometimes
In the fictitious advertising agency Miller Shanks nothing ever seems to go to plan. When The Sun picks up a story that Gloria Hunniford has been groped by a client on an film shoot in Mauritius and PAs are making mock suicide attempts back at the office in London you might be tempted to think
Summary When Giants Learn to Dance sets out to show how truly innovative organizations are winning in the business world, pitting the bureaucratic management of corporate America against the post-entrepreneurial organization.
