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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5u9odp. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

“Escape from Corporate America” by Pamela Skillings is the first truly practical, and eminently readable, book about career-change that I have found. Written in a down-to-earth style, there is also a thread of humor woven through every chapter.

Pamela Skillings is an author, journalist, and entrepreneur who spent twelve years working as a marketing executive for major New York companies.

In 2004, she realized that corporate life wasn’t working for her anymore. By 2005, she left the world of steady paychecks and free office supplies to launch her own company.

During the long process of figuring out how to quit her job without going completely broke, Pamela met dozens of inspiring people that had escaped Corporate America to start businesses, find more life balance, and explore personal passions. She also met dozens who felt stuck in corporate jobs they hated and feared there was no way out.

This book actually made me feel good about myself! Through many trials and countless errors I have discovered for myself a path very similar to the one described by Pamela Skillings. I wish that this book had been around a few years ago, when I decided to get out of the Hospitality Business!

In a stroke of good fortune, I managed to snag a copy for a review, and I was definitely surprised at what I found. This is no re-hash of every other book and blog that purports to tell you how to find your dream job, or change your attitude by changing your latitude. “Escape from Corporate America” is a fresh look at why you may feel stuck (or suffocated) by your fancy corporate job and what to do when you feel like screaming

I hate my job

Some of the highlights include:

• A quiz that you can take to determine if you are a “corporate casualty”. I took the quiz and scored an 18 - which puts me in the category of “on the fence” (to put this in context, if I had scored a 16 I’d be labeled “Disgruntled”). That score is okay for me, because I see myself as more of a consultant and entrepreneur for BigCorp and will be able to exit when things are humming along nicely.
• The “Phases of Corporate Disillusionment”. Skillings interviewed a lot of people for this book. Their stories have been distilled and refined into this Top 10 list of what it feels like to fall into the spiral of corporate despair. If you don’t laugh at these descriptions, you may cry. Have a tissue handy.
• a 7-page worksheet for planning the financial aspects of making a massive career transition. Much more detailed than the usual “save money for 6 months worth of bills”, Skillings asks you to analyze your taxes, IRAs, operating expenses for equipment and vehicles, even professional and family obligations. In just a couple of hours you can create a detailed picture of where you are, financially, today and how to get to where you want to be.

True stories of getting off the hamster-wheel

And that is just in the first half. The second part of “Escape” dives into an analysis of the pros & cons of alternative careers and business models. Skillings is able to maintain the easy reading style and humor, scattering “daring tales of corporate escape” from real people that make the change. Caveat: the stories are not always pretty. Sometimes ramen noodles are involved.

The benefit of including these anecdotes on career change is that Skillings goes on to point out what these escapees did right, and how you can avoid doing what they did wrong. Priceless!

The final gem in this crowning achievement in career planning is an uber-list Skillings calls “The Escape Tool Kit” - a massive list of print and online resources for aiding your plans to escape from the cubicle.

• Online skill tests
• Books and magazines
• How to find a career counselor or coach
• Career research websites
• Financial planning and health care resources
• Job listings and recruiters
• Entrepreneur and freelance resources

Just this list is worth a pile of gold! Go get this book, even if you are not planning on leaving your corporate job. Take the quiz. You might learn something about yourself.

(I put the Amazon affiliate link here at the end, I know you folks hate these, but I want you to be able to get the book if you want it. Remember: Hosting isn’t free.)

If you enjoyed this review, you may like others - click “Book Reviews” to see them all.

UPDATE: See the NY Times interview with Pamela Skillings here. Bonus Productivity pr0n shot of a Moleskine!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5ubhxp. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

I will be giving a presentation later today about interviewing skills, so I have been looking at some career planning info from around teh interweb.

This [link] is a great slideshow about career planning that is a review of Dan Pink’s new book.

Daniel H. Pink is the New York Times bestselling author of A WHOLE NEW MIND and FREE AGENT NATION. He lectures to corporations, associations, and universities around the world on economic transformation and the changing world of work. In 2007, he won a Japan Society Media Fellowship that took him to Tokyo to study the manga industry. Pink lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and their three children.

Another one for the list of reading! Here are the 6 main points:

1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses.
3. It’s not about you.
4. Persistence trumps talent.
5. Make excellent mistakes.
6. Leave an imprint.

Those key principles sum up a lot of the work of Marcus Buckingham, Stephen Covey, and Rick Warren. All in one place.

Check it out.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6bogvz. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

This book by Dan Roam is fantastic. I highly recommend that you watch this video, then go out and buy this book. (Amazon Affiliate link:The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures)

In his book, The Back Of The Napkin, author Dan Roam asserts that that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, but that we — especially in the business world — are never encouraged to develop it. In this video, Roam shows us how anyone with a pen and a scrap of paper can exercise their imagination and work through any business problem by creating pictures. ~From BNET

“The Back of the Napkin” will transform how you think about learning and teaching. Here is an excerpt from the review at Metropolismag.com

How does this tie back to your theory of thinking in pictures?
We all have an innate ability to think in pictures. Well over half the sensory neurons in our brains are oriented towards vision. It is far and away our most sophisticated sense. Designers spend a lot of time studying such things as composition, color, drawing, sketching, all of which are approaches that take advantage of our innate ability to think visually. This is something almost completely missing in business.

Your book could be seen as almost a quiet screed against mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations. How do you sit through these things?
Very painfully. When I have to sit there and watch someone else’s PowerPoint now, I find it difficult, because in my mind I’m screaming, “Please put it away! If your idea is good enough to understand in the amount of time that we have together, couldn’t you just go up to the wipe board and sketch it out for me?” I’m convinced there is an almost magical power in creating a picture, regardless of how simple or ugly it might look, in front of an audience.

The main points:

• Visual Thinking is a four-step process:

1. Look
2. See
3. Imagine
4. Show

• Looking means Collecting and Screening information. Our brains do a lot of this automatically, delivering to our conscious minds the information about our surroundings relating to-
  • Orientation (which way is up?),
  • Position (where am I?),
  • Identification (what is that?), and
  • Direction (where is it going?)
• There are rules for learning better Looking skills

1. Collect everything that you can
2. Lay it all out where you can look at it
3. Establish fundamental coordinates (are you looking at time, at a quantity, etc.)
4. Practice visual triage (what do you not need to look at?)

Roam has pulled together an amazing amount of information and presents it in a clear and concise manner with examples and sample drawings. You can also check out his website here. Buy this book from Amazon The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and support Productivity in Context.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/55lt6u. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen