What Color Is Your Parachute? 2008: A Practical Manual for Job-hunters and Career-Changers

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR PARACHUTE? is still the best-selling job-hunting book in the world. A favorite of job hunters and career changers for more than three decades, it continues to be a mainstay on best-seller lists, from Amazon.com to Business Week to the New York Times, where it has spent more than six years, and has been translated into 12 languages. The 2008 edition is an even more useful book, with its updated, inspiring, and detailed plan for changing readers' lives. With new examples, instructions, and cautionary advice, PARACHUTE is, to quote Fortune magazine, "the gold standard of career guides."

Now, Discover Your Strengths

Effectively managing personnel--as well as one's own behavior--is an extraordinarily complex task that, not surprisingly, has been the subject of countless books touting what each claims is the true path to success. That said, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths does indeed propose a unique approach: focusing on enhancing people's strengths rather than eliminating their weaknesses. Following up on the coauthors' popular previous book, First, Break All the Rules, it fully describes 34 positive personality themes the two have formulated (such as Achiever, Developer, Learner, and Maximizer) and explains how to build a "strengths-based organization" by capitalizing on the fact that such traits are already present among those within it.

Most original and potentially most revealing, however, is a Web-based interactive component that allows readers to complete a questionnaire developed by the Gallup Organization and instantly discover their own top-five inborn talents. This device provides a personalized window into the authors' management philosophy which, coupled with subsequent advice, places their suggestions into the kind of practical context that's missing from most similar tomes. "You can't lead a strengths revolution if you don't know how to find, name and develop your own," write Buckingham and Clifton. Their book encourages such introspection while providing knowledgeable guidance for applying its lessons. --Howard Rothman

I'm on LinkedIn -- Now What???: A Guide to Getting the Most OUT of LinkedIn

I'm on LinkedIn -- Now What??? is a book designed to help you get the most out this popular business networking site. With over 12 million members there is a lot of potential to find and develop relationships to help in your business and personal life, but many professionals find themselves wondering what to do once they signup. This book explains the different benefits of the system and recommends best practices so that you can get the most out of LinkedIn.

Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life

Change can be a blessing or a curse, depending on your perspective. The message of Who Moved My Cheese? is that all can come to see it as a blessing, if they understand the nature of cheese and the role it plays in their lives. Who Moved My Cheese? is a parable that takes place in a maze. Four beings live in that maze: Sniff and Scurry are mice--nonanalytical and nonjudgmental, they just want cheese and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it. Hem and Haw are "littlepeople," mouse-size humans who have an entirely different relationship with cheese. It's not just sustenance to them; it's their self-image. Their lives and belief systems are built around the cheese they've found. Most of us reading the story will see the cheese as something related to our livelihoods--our jobs, our career paths, the industries we work in--although it can stand for anything, from health to relationships. The point of the story is that we have to be alert to changes in the cheese, and be prepared to go running off in search of new sources of cheese when the cheese we have runs out.

Dr. Johnson, coauthor of The One Minute Manager and many other books, presents this parable to business, church groups, schools, military organizations--anyplace where you find people who may fear or resist change. And although more analytical and skeptical readers may find the tale a little too simplistic, its beauty is that it sums up all natural history in just 94 pages: Things change. They always have changed and always will change. And while there's no single way to deal with change, the consequence of pretending change won't happen is always the same: The cheese runs out. --Lou Schuler

Designed for Success: The 10 Commandments for Women in the Workplace

The 10 Commandments for Women in the Workplace. Learn How To:

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful

America's most sought-after executive coach shows how to climb the last few rungs of the ladderThe corporate world is filled with executives, men and women who have worked hard for years to reach the upper levels of management. They're intelligent, skilled, and even charismatic. But only a handful of them will ever reach the pinnacle -- and as executive coach Marshall Goldsmith shows in this book, subtle nuances make all the difference. These are small "transactional flaws" performed by one person against another (as simple as not saying thank you enough), which lead to negative perceptions that can hold any executive back. Using Goldsmith's straightforward, jargonfree advice, it's amazingly easy behavior to change.Executives who hire Goldsmith for one-on-one coaching pay $250,000 for the privilege. With this book, his help is available for 1/10,000th of the price.

Rites of Passage at $100,000 to $1 Million+: Your Insider's Lifetime Guide to Executive Job-Changing and Faster Career Progress in the 21st Century

John Lucht, an executive recruiter during the past three decades for some of America's top corporations, knows what it takes to snag a new six-figure job. Rites of Passage at $100,000 to $1 Million+ is his newly revised guide to the ins and outs of a search for a job that ends in success. It promises a "comprehensive cram course in accelerating your career"--a contemporary corporate equivalent of the traditional initiation into adulthood from which it takes its title--updated for the cyber-age. And it delivers, with Lucht offering inside tips on the basic routes to a new executive-level position: personal contacts (i.e., "ask for a reference instead of a job"); networking ("never fail to get into the office of anyone whose name is mentioned to you, never depart with less than three new names"); executive recruiters ("understand their hidden financial arrangements"); direct mail ("write to the CEO or a person two levels above your target job"); and the Internet ("insert plenty of the right 'keywords' so that the computer will find your resume"). Extensive online references are also included throughout, and the material is presented in a way that's easy to understand and implement. --Howard Rothman

Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box

Using the story/parable format so popular these days, Leadership and Self-Deception takes a novel psychological approach to leadership. It's not what you do that matters, say the authors (presumably plural--the book is credited to the esteemed Arbinger Institute), but why you do it. Latching onto the latest leadership trend won't make people follow you if your motives are selfish--people can smell a rat, even one that says it's trying to empower them. The tricky thing is, we don't know that our motivation is flawed. We deceive ourselves in subtle ways into thinking that we're doing the right thing for the right reason. We really do know what the right thing to do is, but this constant self-justification becomes such an ingrained habit that it's hard to break free of it--it's as though we're trapped in a box, the authors say.

Learning how the process of self-deception works--and how to avoid it and stay in touch with our innate sense of what's right--is at the heart of the book. We follow Tom, an old-school, by-the-book kind of guy who is a newly hired executive at Zagrum Corporation, as two senior executives show him the many ways he's "in the box," how that limits him as a leader in ways he's not aware of, and of course how to get out. This is as much a book about personal transformation as it is about leadership per se. The authors use examples from the characters' private as well as professional lives to show how self-deception skews our view of ourselves and the world and ruins our interactions with people, despite what we sincerely believe are our best intentions.

While the writing won't make John Updike lose any sleep, the story entertainingly does the job of pulling the reader in and making a potentially abstruse argument quite enjoyable. The authors have a much better ear for dialogue than is typical of the genre (the book is largely dialogue), although a certain didactic tone creeps in now and then. But ultimately it's a hopeful, even inspiring read that flows along nicely and conveys a message that more than a few managers need to hear. --Pat McGill

Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood

No More Monday Morning Blues...

You're about to be liberated! Here is the book you've been waiting for-a-step-by-step guide to finding the "work" that expresses and fulfills your needs, talents, and passions. Using dozens of real-life examples, Marsha Sinetar shows you how to overcome your fears, take the little risks that make big risks possible, and become a person whose work means self-expression, growth, and love!

Discover how to:

Tune into your inner world and your unique talents

Evaluate and build your self-esteem--the three key questions to ask yourself

Banish your outmoded network of "shoulds "

Deal with the Big R--resistance

Liberate yourself from an unfulfilling job...and much more!



Discover how to tune in to your inner world and your unique talents; evaluate and build your self-esteem, banish your out-moded network of "shoulds" and liberate yourself from an unfulfilling job with this step-by-step guide to finding work that satisfies your passions. -->

Heard on the Street: Quantitative Questions from Wall Street Job Interviews

The tenth edition contains 165 quantitative questions collected from actual job interviews in investment banking, investment management, and options trading. The interviewers use the same questions year-after-year and here they are---with solutions! These questions come from all types of interviews (corporate finance, sales and trading, quant research, etc), but they are especially likely in quantitative capital markets job interviews. The questions come from all levels of interviews (undergrad, MBA, PhD), but they are especially likely if you have, or almost have, an MS or MBA. The latest edition includes over 120 non-quantitative actual interview questions, and a new section on interview technique---based partly on Dr. Crack's experiences interviewing candidates for the world's largest institutional asset manager. Dr. Crack has a PhD from MIT. He has won many teaching awards and has publications in the top academic, practitioner, and teaching journals in finance. He has degrees in Mathematics/Statistics, Finance, and Financial Economics and a diploma in Accounting/Finance. Dr. Crack taught at the university level for 20 years including four years as a front line teaching assistant for MBA students at MIT. He recently headed a quantitative active equity research team at the world's largest institutional money manager.