Free (nook/Kindle/iTunes) Improvise: Unconventional Advice [CEO Business Memoir]

[ATDrake]

Improvise: Unconventional Career Advice from an Unlikely CEO by Fred Cook of the Golin PR firm (Wikipedia) is his humorous anecdotal much-varied personal work experiences memoir cum serious derived tips for Exactly What It Says In The Title, aimed at aspiring new graduate professionals who might want to consider going off the beaten path, free courtesy of publisher Agate's B2 imprint.

Currently free, probably just until the weekend @ B&N (may also drop in the UK) & Amazon UK (slated to drop in the main store) & iTunes (not available to Canadians), and might also show up later as a DRM-free PDF download available worldwide directly @ the publisher's webcatalogue page, as Agate freebies sometimes do.

And this has been the selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.

It was a tough choice between this and the other semi-memoir advice guide for aspiring creative artists, but this just narrowly edged it out for containing more in the way of funny crazy job stories that apparently include an up close and personal encounter with Steve Jobs' notorious Reality Distortion Field (Wikipedia), which as a Mac user, I am powerless to resist. <-- none of my computers have ever looked anything like that; well, maybe my MacBook kind of does if you chop off the entire back of the CRT and lose the box.

Enjoy!

Description
This year alone, 3.2 million US students will graduate from college. More than half of them will move back home and struggle to find jobs in their fields of study. Aspiring professionals feel intense pressure to make all the right moves necessary to find their dream career. Conventional wisdom demands they attend the best schools, get the best grades, score the best internships, and land the perfect job.

Fred Cook sees things differently. He believes that there are interesting alternatives to the traditional career path, and that young people are better off forging their own unique trails to the top—better off improvising. Improvising takes more courage than a rung-by-rung climb up that ladder, but it can be a lot more rewarding, as Cook illustrates with the checkered story of his own unpromising early career in Improvise.

Cook was initiated into the business world through a number of lackluster yet enlightening jobs, including pool hustler, chauffeur for drunks, junior high substitute teacher, cabin boy on a Norwegian tanker, Italian leather salesman, and doorman at a four-star hotel. From these unusual work experiences and the chance encounters they furnished, Cook gained valuable insights about business and learned how to make the most of even the worst opportunity.

Each chapter of Improvise features a bold, straightforward lesson that Cook has gleaned during his unorthodox early career, reinforced with insights from his later efforts working in corporate America, where he has provided PR advice and crisis counsel to blue-chip companies like Nintendo, McDonald's, Walmart, BP, and Toyota, and worked personally with Jeff Bezos, Michael Eisner, Herb Kelleher, and Sheldon Adelson.

Filled with colorful anecdotes about being punched by a guru, flooded out of his squatter's hut in Crete, and browbeaten by Steve Jobs, Improvise also offers exceptionally insightful and practical tips on how aspiring professionals can change their perspectives and use their rich life experiences to fuel their ambitions. These are unprecedented times that require unconventional tools, and Cook's unique experiences have resulted in a book that offers wisdom, encouragement, and entertainment to a generation of people searching for success on their own terms.

[murg]

It's free at Amazon US.