Fire Your Boss

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Summary: Fire Your Boss by Stephen Pollan and Mark Levine
Review: "Fire Your Boss" is a gift to a generation of Baby Boomers and everyone else who "has no time" as they pursue "careers" at the expense of family and social life.

A fulfilling "career" seemed like a good idea in response to the antiseptic 9:00 - 5:00 routine many of us saw on "Leave it to Beaver," but it has back-fired in an era when corporate loyalty is passé.

Elaborating on a theme presented in his seminal work, "Die Broke" (a must-read), Stephen Pollan maintains that work is the place where we earn money to do what we want to do with the remainder of our lives. The mindset of pursing a "career" rather than having a "job" is what seduces people into spending hours upon hours of uncompensated time in the workplace.

"Fire Your Boss" is not proposing that your literally "fire your boss," but refers to re-thinking your relationship to the workplace. If work is a "job," then you want to get in, get out and get paid. And while you're at it, focus on what your boss needs to succeed, not what you need. Combine the "job" mentality with perpetually being on the look-out for better paying opportunities-aka "fishing," and your life and your income become yours.

"Fire Your Boss" is enhanced by the use of actual client stories (disguised to protect identity) that describe real people in situations with which we are all familiar. It is also replete with practical, step-by-step advice.

As usual, Stephen Pollan is strikingly counterintuitive. Whether or not you actually follow the plan set forth in the book, "Fire Your Boss" will get you thinking-and may change your life.

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Summary: Definitely worth the time
Review: After being in the workforce for 15 years I thought I was an expert, but there are a lot of gems in this book.
I enjoyed reading it and the writer's style made it a pleasant and rewarding read for me.
I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Definitely worth the time
Review: After being in the workforce for 15 years I thought I was an expert, but there are a lot of gems in this book.
I enjoyed reading it and the writer's style made it a pleasant and rewarding read for me.
I highly recommend it.

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Summary: The way careers really work -- for many people
Review: Fire Your Boss isn't really about getting rid of your boss. It's about taking proactive steps to avoid being in a one-down position.

You'll like Fire Your Boss if you buy into the authors' value system Pollan and Levine don't mince words. Work, they say, is about money. Given a choice of two job offers, choose whichever gives you the most money, time or both. Don't expect satisfaction and fulfillment from work.

For many people, this advice will make sense. However, some people work in truly toxic environments and they'll become ill -- mentally and/or physically -- if they stay. Some companies (such as SAS in North Carolina) offer quality of life that makes sense for many employees. And some people manage to have truly wonderful jobs.

Once on the job, say the authors, success comes from pleasing your boss. Never mind the company: it's all about keeping your boss on your side because she's the only person who can help you. In general, this advice is excellent; however, company culture can influence your boss's power, your ability to transfer within the firm and/or your ability to avoid being fired.

I stay away from absolutes -- so "Nobody hires a stranger" should be translated, "People like to hire their friends." The best section of the book covers networking: these days, you make friends, not contacts. So your long-term strategy will involve joining groups and socializing with people who can help you.

And, as with all career books, you have to do some reality checks. When you get a competing offer from an outside firm, say the authors, pay attention to a counter-offer from your own firm. However, some experts say that sixty to eighty percent of employees who accept those counteroffers are gone in six months. If you do accept a counteroffer, get a contract or the type of termination agreement these authors recommend.

The very best advice from these authors: Always keep "fishing," as they say. Never stop watching the job market. Prepare to move for the right conditions.

I don't agree with their checklists of "factors" -- I've developed my own decision processes -- and I think you have to be careful before jumping ship too fast. Some people are hired to be scapegoats, some bosses have hidden agendas, and some employees do get stranded in tiny towns in the middle of nowhere.

I suspect the authors fill in the blanks when they're coaching one-to-one and/or they choose their clients very, very carefully. And I definitely recommend this book as a perspective that, while incomplete, offers a helpful corrective to the airy promises of "Dream and do it."

For career change, I'd supplement with Herminia Ibarra's Working Identity and Martha Beck's Finding Your Own North Star.

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Summary: Not just another career development book
Review: I just voluntarily left a company after serving twelve years and achieving good success in terms of my own development. I worked hard and received good learning opportunities and advancement in return. One of the things I didn't do a good job of was asking for the money to fairly compensate me for my contributions, watching my overtime, and sizing myself up in terms of what the external job market could offer me. This book offered more than one practical solution that helps one to re-think the concepts of "career", "work" and "compensation". It also does an excellent job pointing out that the main reason we work is for the financial rewards, and to look to our personal lifes to give us emotional and psychic fulfillment. When we quit looking or expecting our jobs to gives us 100% emotional and psychic fullfillment, our work lives and our personal lives become richer in the process. I'll definitely use and reuse this book as a reference when I pick up my job search again. Well worth the money I paid for it.

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Summary: My thoughts exactly
Review: I really liked this book because it encapsulates and enlarges upon conclusions that I had come to myself.

Mr. Pollan and Mr. Levine are very right when they advise us to be on a constant job search. The employment environment has become so erratic and unpredictable that this is a must. Those people who ignore this advice end up fruitlessly sending out resumes for years before they find another position.

I also like their advice in Chapter 4 ("There's no I in Job"). It had never occurred to me to observe my boss and write down the observations to determine what the boss' real wants and needs were. If I had done that I might have been more successful at some of my jobs.

Their observation that there is no definite correlation between job performance and compensation is consistent with my experience. Usually raises for outstanding performance are only slightly higher than inflation. The only way to obtain a larger raise is to have a credible threat of quitting or to move to another firm. I think that the only type of performance that will result in a definite change of compensation is poor performance or non-performance. That will result in a firing or a layoff. But mediocre performance, good performance, outstanding performance? They all get more or less equivalent compensation.

So as not to sound too cynical I would say that the value of outstanding performance is that one usually learns more by doing this. This is learning can help one advance within a company (in terms of responsibility and authority, not necessarily compensation) or obtain a position at another firm.

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Summary: Title should be "How to be a brown nosing suck up"
Review: Reading the other reviews of this book makes me think that either Stephen Pollan paid a lot of people to write reviews, or else everyone else in America works in the most cyncical, Dilbert-esque companies imaginable.

This book starts with an idea that does make some sense: the purpose of a job should be to make money so that it can provide you with financial resources to have a rewarding emotional life at home with your family and community. Many people have been caught up in having a "career", trying to find personal satisfaction on the job, instead of finding personal satisfaction at home. In the end, they end up having neither, spending so much time at work and then realizing that they can be downsized in an instant.

However, he takes this idea to the most absurd extreme: the only thing that should really matter about a job is how much you get paid. Forget doing interesting, challenging work, forget an environment that you enjoy. Furthermore, a lot of his advice is just plain wrong. For example, his chapter "There's No I in Job" is about how you should just suck up to your boss and make him look good. Well, what happens your boss leaves or moves to a different department? If your value isn't recognized by others in the company, you're back to square one. His other chapter about always being on the look out to jump to the next job is the stupidest drivel I've ever read. I can guarantee that during the tech bust the LAST people to get hired were the ones who jumped from company to company every six months in the late 90s.

Frankly, it IS possible to find an enjoying, satisfying job AND still put your family and home life first. In a couple years this book will be relegated to the dust heap of so many other "Wow, look at this radical, contrarian idea" self help books, right where it belongs.

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Summary: Fire Your Boss by Pollan
Review: The work challenges us to think critically about how much time we spend in work-related things without compensation. For instance, the opportunity cost of travelling to work, searching for work and bringing work home- all adds up to performing substantial tasks free of charge. The author inspires us to measure and quantify our greatest achievements and to do what we do best. There are chapters on how to compare job offers for those who work and how to get an exceptional raise. Essentially, the author's strategies require that we track very carefully
all of our efforts so that the substantiation is present when we ask for a raise. The Pollan book will be helpful in focusing your career planning and on contemplating whether or not you should work for yourself or work for others.

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Summary: Good way to look at things
Review: This book has a different way of looking at your career. Basically it says forget about loving your job or career like the other guides such as What Color is Your Parachute and Do What You Love the Money Will Follow. This book says work for the money and do what you love on the weekends and nights.

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Summary: Leave the dust on your resume' books!
Review: This book will show you exactly how to get on with your new "free-lance" gun-for-hire work life in this age of outsourcing and corporate racing to the bottom.

The author very deftly and patiently gives full explanations behind his recommendations, and he is DEAD ON. Company loyalty gets you nowhere these days, and you have to think like a sword-for-hire to survive...the book tells us how.

Become your own free agent. Work to live, don't live to work. Fire your boss, quit your career, and plan your exit strategy when you first get in the door. The only way to make REAL payraises is to keep moving from job to job, industry to industry, keeping you and the money/benefits at the forefront--regardless of the Protestant work ethic we've all been raised with. It's called "job fishing", and it's the new networking (cultivated from SOCIAL life leads rather than work life leads, and yes, you now have to get a social life!). By always keeping your resume' circulating--and a pole in the water--job leads will come to YOU rather than you working for them. You simply sort through what's found its way onto your hook.

This method, as brought to us in this superb book, cuts through all the interview and hire bull--all the superficial stuff, like appearance, politics (personal and other), power struggles, and the lowdown on starting salaries (such as usually being about $5k less than the last denizen of that particular post). We can negotiate our own employment tickets now, starting with money and chosen benefits, right down to termination agreements...putting back into our hands the power to determine exactly how we enter and leave a job.

It shows you how to prioritize opportunities according to YOUR needs instead of the employer's needs, and how to KEEP that job if that's where you really want to stay for more than a year, and how to keep the raises coming.

There's also a section on how to make the best use of temp agencies, headhunter agencies, and other "traditional" job hunting techniques.

If you're just starting, starting over, or merely wishing to move on, I advise getting this book to join the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd century method of job "security." (ha-ha-ha)

In the review style of Joe Bob Briggs, this book has:
No breasts
No aardvarking
No physical attack styles
No gratuitousness of any kind
Lots of "money-fu" and "you-fu"
Not nominated for any drive-in Academy Awards...

But Wenchypoo and FedUpWithLiars still gives it 5 stars! Check it out.