"Rebounding" from Job Loss, "WWGD?" and "Wired to Care"
Jack Covert Selects, the series of reviews from 800CEORead looking at important business books, has three recent reviews at three new books:
The most recent is Rebound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss, made poignantly topical by Covert as he notes the shutting down of four bookstores.
Covert calls Rebound
an invaluable resource that the newly unemployed worker can use to make sense of his or her situation, confront the mixed feelings that come along with it, and understand the new rules of careers so that he or she will be well-equipped to develop a plan of action and find a new job.He admires its tone, which is reassuring, and its structure, which includes ending each chapter with a section on the best, worst and first things a reader can do. He calls Rebound "an excellent companion to have during this uncertain, difficult times."
Covert also looks at a book that recommends a different course of action in these times: Do what Google would. His take on Jeff Jarvis' new What Would Google Do? is that this is the book on the Internet that businesspeople need to read in 2009; my preliminary look was considerably more skeptical.
The meat of Covert's review notes that
The section headings in this book read like the mantras of Silicon Valley and Web 2.0: "Join the open-source, gift economy;" "The post-scarcity economy;" "Free as a business model;" "The mass market is dead--long live the mass of niches." These are no longer heretical or revolutionary ideas, and Jarvis doesn't pretend that they are. What he does is explain these ideas as clearly as possible, detail some of the history that led us to this new frontier, and let you know how to adapt.Perhaps it is useful to know where we have been. But some of these very ideas, like post-scarcity and free business models, may already be dead.
Covert also examines Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy. In this book the strategist Dev Patnaik argues that companies able to develop an empathetic culture will do better than those that don't. As Covert concludes in his recommendation of this book:
At a time when the state of business is in flux and we are seeing jobs disappear every day, Wired to Care tells of the unexpected solutions that come when people see the world through another's eyes. This book shows that if leaders remove the disconnect that exists within their organizations and engage in an empathetic approach to their companies, as well as the world around them, the future is limitless.