Customer Reviews

Promoting Yourself: 52 Lessons for Getting to the Top . . . and Staying There

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Use this book as a sort of guidance counselor. Mr. Lancaster wrote the short easy-to-read chapters much like a career journal column in the Wall Street Journal.
All of the chapters won't apply to everyone, but Lancaster does a good job of moving along the topic with good specific examples.
A quick read that will stay on my referral shelf. All topics covered should apply now and in the future to all of us out there with difficult jobs, bosses and decisions to be made. Good stuff!

Mr. Lancaster manages to pick some of the most intriguing topics for the "lessons" in his book, but time after time he glosses over them without saying much of anything new. These short essays (most are two pages long) do not have enough meat to make this book work. The table of contents looks good, but the payoff is just not there.

Promoting Yourself: 52 Lessons For Getting To The Top...And Staying There by journalist and columnist Hal Lancaster (The Wall Street Journal) is a solid business book packed with a wealth of practical tips, trips, and techniques to surviving office politics and new bosses, making oneself look good for promotion, improving one's negotiation and communication skills, and much more. A highly practical and sensible book for dedicated workers looking to earn a higher position in their chosen field, Promoting Yourself is especially recommended for the non-specialist general reader and a welcome contribution to community library Jobs/Careers reference collections.

I enjoyed Lancaster's column in the journal and hoped he would distill his work there into book form. Much of what he describes is done in other books; however he writes crisply and well. The book lacks jargon or chirpy advice. I find more balance in his examples than in most books of this type. He's clearly thought long and hard about these issues and it shows.

Mr. Lancaster knows a lot about careers. He wrote the 'Career Column' for the Wall Street Journal. I read that now, and it's pretty interesting (though i only agree with the 'conclusions' 50% of the time).
I didn't find this book strong, though. The auther finds winners, and picks out their career path, and then says "See, you do the same." He profiles a woman who became a CEO of a Silicon Valley company in one of the 52 chapters. She started out as a kindergarten teacher, then moved into business. Mr. Lancaster reprints her quote "I feel that being a kindergarten teacher is a great introduction to business, because you have to keep the attention of 30,50,100 people." HUH? I have three children, and holding their attention has little to do with business success, at least not that I've seen in my 20 years as an engineer and project manager.
Also, the book does not take into account the existence of luck at all. Everyone who 'wins' the game of business did it through sheer intelligence and determination.
That doesn't happen in the real world. There is luck involved.
There are tens of thousands of engineers trying to do what Bill Gates did, and only about 1% are achieving even a small portion of his success. An author can take Bill G's life, show how "brilliant" he was for dropping out of Harvard as a freshman, and starting a highly risky technical firm. This is poor advice, though. I would never recommend anyone dropping out of Harvard to start a business. Just because it worked for Bill G doesn't mean it's a highly probable recipe for success.

The auther also frames issues too narrowly, and leaves out important aspects of peoples lives. As a father, i'm not so willing to move from state to state as a rising executive. That's my choice. However, his 52 ways assume you'll do ANYTHING to get ahead, that your whole life is centered around business success. That's too narrow of a definition for me.
The book assumes you'll pay any price to get ahead.
Yet it doesn't state that directly, which is a very key point.
He also left out some key psychological traits that business leaders possess: ruthlessness and an ability to feel comfortable winning at any cost, as long as the authority figure in your institution accepts it.

This book is a quick read, because it's pretty superficial.
If you've been in the business world for 10+ years, and you don't know a lot of these things by now, well, um, you need to pay attention more.
If you're 100% committed to your business life, and you will do anything at anytime for anyone to get ahead, then you can learn some fine points of behaivor from this book.
Otherwise, this is like saying you'll be Bill Gates if you
do what Bill Gates did.