Grow Your Personal Capital: What You Know, Who You Know And How To Use It (Momentum)

Packed with illustrative examples and interactive exercises, this book shows you to maximize the value of your knowledge capital (what you know), social capital (whom you know), and emotional capital (how you interact with others)-and combine these components to make you a more successful, effective, balanced, and fulfilled person.Momentum books are for people who want to make things happen in their career and their life, who want to work at something they enjoy and that's worthy of their talent and their time. Momentum people have values and principles. They question who they are and what they do. Wherever they work, they want to feel that what they do has meaning.

Editorial Reviews

To the author of this overwrought business/self-help manifesto, augmenting one's human capital means unleashing the full range of psychic resources-creativity, sociability, emotion, "inner wisdom"-that are indispensable to modern "knowledge workers." Owen (Creating Top Flight Teams) draws on psychologists from Jung to Maslow (with a little quantum mechanics and chaos theory thrown in) to argue that human capital can only be tapped by nurturing "the whole human being" in a workplace where employees find "purpose, meaning and belonging," express "authentic emotion" and cultivate ecstatic "flow experiences." Although "rigid management processes" are an important obstacle, this is not a management program. Judging from the oral histories Owens recounts, the book is aimed at high-level managers with indefinable jobs ("my role is troubleshooter, with a large people aspect to it") who drift from company to company seeking self-actualization. The focus is therefore on individual rather than institutional change, to be achieved through self-exploratory "exercises" including meditation, dream-journaling, art projects ("[w]hen you have finished, sit cross-legged on the floor and tell yourself the collage is you") and vast, Proustian writing assignments ("starting with your earliest memories, describe all your experiences... up to today") with impossible deadlines ("[a]llow at least an hour"). Veering between mystical dilation ("we are all connected in a field of energy") and pop-psychology truisms "[w]hen we deny our feelings... we are at risk of losing control") this mish-mash of half-digested ideas will bring little return on investment. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

About The Author:

About The Author:

Hilarie Owen is chief executive of the Institute of Leadership. An internationally sought-after guest lecturer and conference speaker, she lives in Gloucester, U.K.