Thrive: Standing On Your Own Two Feet in a Borderless World

Thrive: Standing on Your Own Two Feet in a Borderless World, Mike Cook, St. Lynn's Press, 2006

The business world has drastically changed in the last few years. This book shows how to develop the
inner strength and abilities to survive in the new global marketplace.

For many years, a central component of American business involved the concepts of Commitment and Loyalty. It was a time when a person could expect to spend their entire working career at one company. As long as the employee was willing to give the company the best years of their life, and not even think about going to another company that may be a better fit for the employee (keep dissenting opinions to yourself), the company will be there to take care of the employee. If you haven't already learned, the hard way, that such a way of thinking no longer exists, you will.

The most important thing, in today's world, is to learn to be adaptable, which involves several things. First of all, take personal responsibility for your own financial welfare; no one else will do it for you. Come up with your own personal vision; something more than simply "employment at my previous salary level." Technical competence and reputation are pretty self-explanatory. The last is collaborative competence. It doesn't just involve how well you get along with others at work, but how well you bring value to the workplace. In the myriad of small and large interactions that make up the workplace, how willing are people to interact with you? If you can become something like the "go to" person, upper management will think long and hard before giving you a pink slip.

This book doesn't try to lay blame for globalization, or look at "hot" industries in the coming years, but tries to show a new way of thinking so that a person in any industry can make themselves indispensable at work. It succeeds really well, and is very much worth reading.

The Engines of Dawn

The Engines of Dawn, Paul Cook, ROC Books, 1999

For hundreds of years, man has traveled the stars with the help of Engines from an alien race called the Enamorati. As part of the arrangement, the Enamorati jealously gaurd the secret of their Engines.

One day, Eos University, built inside a hollowed out asteroid, comes out of hyperspace, stranding it with a failed Engine. One of the effects of Engine travel on humans is called the Ennui. It isn't so much a sickness as a general lack of initiative. Students from the Physics Department start their own unofficial investigation, even going into the Enamorati section of the ship, off limits to humans. There they find signs of what looks like an Enamorati civil war.

While the Engine is being replaced with another from the Enamorati home world, a nearly religious process also off limits to humans, a group of students from the Archaeology Department travel to a nearby earth-like planet. Amid the ruins of ancient cities, they find some Very Interesting Things about the Enamorati and their Engines.

I really liked this novel. It works as space opera and as a conspiracy story. The climax was also noticeably above average.