Your Job Survival Guide: A Manual for Thriving in Change

Selected by IBM Competitive Edge Book Club Selection. 

"The beauty of this book on top of its life-saving timeliness is its capacity to give the reader concrete steps to live the good life and enjoy it.  The book made me understand that work can be more fun than fun.”

–Warren Bennis, Ph.D., University Professor, University of Southern California, coauthor, Judgment: How Great Leaders Make Winning Calls and Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor

Change. It’s your job. It just won’t stop. It’s relentless. It keeps coming at you like never-ending rapids in a permanent whitewater river. Change will burn you out if you don’t learn how to handle it. This book is not, however, about mere survival.  It is about thriving amidst the challenges of your permanent whitewater world at work. 

•Protect your career, improve your resilience, and seize the opportunities in turbulent times

•Take charge, learn to pace yourself, set your own course, and lead others in ad-hoc teams

•Ride the rapids and rediscover play and adventure in today’s demanding work environment 

•Learn from research and the experiences of hundreds of professionals in industries from energy to telecommunications to financial services to health care

There’s nothing abstract or cute about the way this book talks about change: This is practical, grounded knowledge for managing your life in a business world that’s churning with change. Gregory Shea, Ph.D. and Robert Gunther show how to keep your working life on course instead of being pushed beyond your limits...find fun and fulfillment...regroup and rebound from failure...protect yourself from events you can’t predict...take charge of your life, an your future!

Gregory Shea, Ph.D., consults, researches, writes, and teaches in the areas of organizational and individual change, leadership, group effectiveness, and conflict resolution. He is president of the consulting firm Shea & Associates, a principal in The Coxe Group international consultancy; Senior Consultant at the Center for Applied Research, Adjunct Professor of Management at The Wharton School, where he has taught for more than 25 years, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, and a Faculty Associate of the Wharton School’s Center for Leadership and Change. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, Shea holds an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and an M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. in Administrative Science from Yale. He is a member of the Academy of Management and the American Psychological Association.

Robert Gunther is coauthor or collaborator on more than 20 books, including The Wealthy 100 and The Truth About Making Smart Decisions. He has appeared on CNBC’s “Power Lunch,” NPR’s “Morning Edition,” and numerous local and national radio and television programs, and his projects have been featured in The New York Times, Time, USA Today, and Fortune. His columns or articles also have been published in Harvard Business Review, American Heritage, Investor’s Business Daily, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. As founder of Gunther Communications, he has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, universities, and major nonprofits. He is a graduate of Princeton University.