Suzen Fromstein, “Suits and Ladders: Ten Proven Ways to Keep Your Job Safe” (Carrick Publishing, 2013)

I’m Al Emid and I’m back here on New Books Network after a long absence. I had a good excuse though – I was finishing up the book entitled Investing in Frontier Markets, to be released this Fall by John Wiley & Sons and co-authored with Gavin Graham. Barring unforeseen circumstances I will be back here regularly with reviews of timely books in the investing and business categories, which I’ve covered for years as a journalist.

And in the business news category, firings, layoffs and forced resignations have occurred frequently for the past five years. Anyone who has recently lost what seemed like a secure job can be forgiven for wondering where he or she went wrong – but in many cases the fault did not lay with the terminated employee. And we can understand how any individual who has fulltime employment might wonder how long that will last. In the past year, blue-chip employers have terminated thousands of employees: 2400 at Dow Chemical, 5400 at American Express, over 4300 at Bank America and even 4000 at Google. The list goes on: United Technologies, Thomson Reuters, Proctor & Gamble and others. And declining revenues don’t always explain the layoffs. In late May ESPN confirmed plans to lay off 400 employees despite an increase in operating income of 8%. ESPN had not had any layoffs since 2009. And we know that positions in the executive suite have become equally uncertain. So in the face of all of this how does one survive? Suzen Fromstein offers some clues in her book Suits and Ladders: Ten Proven Ways to Keep Your Job Safe (Carrick Publishing, 2013) and it contains what she describes as universal survival strategies. Her book is on Amazon Kindle in ebook and paperback versions. Suzen fesses up and says that her own failure to keep her job inspired her book.

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