TOP DRAWER BOOK REVIEW
by
HL Carpenter

Resilience at Work
by Salvatore R. Maddi and Deborah M. Khoshaba
ISBN 0-8144-7260-5
213 pages; hardcover; $22.00
AMACOM, New York, 2005

Are you stressed? So is everyone else, on a daily, recurring basis. Fortunately, being stressed matters less than how you deal with your stress.

In Resilience at Work, Dr. Maddi and Ms. Khoshaba, psychologists and researchers, contend the best attitude is one of resilience, or the ability to turn lemons into a sweet drink of success. They base this conclusion on a study of employees at Illinois Bell Telephone during the time those employees were overwhelmed by the deregulation of AT&T.

Through case studies, the authors show how resilient employees managed to thrive in the midst of upheaval while their less ‘hardy’ colleagues failed to cope. They also provide questions and exercises to allow you to rate your own resilience. If your self-assessment comes out less favorably than you’d like, there are steps and suggestions for how to improve. (And after reading the ‘failure’ cases, there’s little doubt you’ll be motivated to improve.)

The good news is resilience can be learned. The stressful news? Like every other form of personal change, it takes a lot of work. As always, you’ll have to squeeze the juice from the lemons yourself. But the exercises in Resilience at Work may help you strain the pits.

Review originally published March 2006.