It doesn’t seem like there are many books in the market about how to best part with a former employer, respecting the professional and personal results of such breaks. Steven Manchel’s “I Hereby Resign” Job Transitioning: How Individuals Properly Prepare, Resign and Move to the Competition, and How Companies Best Manage that Process looks to fill that potential hole in non-fiction business writing. You deserve forgiveness if, at initial inspection, you underestimate the value of his book. Eight four pages in its hardcover edition seems like scant space allotted to such an important and multi-faceted subject. Manchel, however, calls upon decades of professional and personal experience with the subject that allows him to deal with the host of questions and concerns arising from this issue in lean and comprehensive fashion.
It begins with something seemingly simple like structure. Manchel breaks his text into two parts – how to handle departing one company and how a new company conducts themselves when hiring individuals from direct competitors. Some of the solutions and advice he promotes along the way read like common sense directives, but any thinking adult is well aware individuals often behave themselves in less than sensible ways. Mistakes made transitioning from one company to another can cost people and businesses a great deal – good will crumbles, legal questions arise, reputations are tarnished. Often times various subjects in everyday human endeavor demand someone who can come along and clarify for us what we are, perhaps, too close to see in revealing light. Manchel accomplishes that with his book.
AMAZON: www.amazon.ae/Hereby-Resign-Transitioning-Individuals-Competition/dp/1733040846
His strong and down to earth writing style helps in that area. Manchel is a longtime educator as well as a lawyer but let us be thankful he doesn’t write like a lawyer. The prose for “I Hereby Resign” is never dry and humorless, avoids spouting off an assortment of talking points in colorless fashion, and attempts connecting with readers on a basic level rather than maintaining a distance from their lives and concerns. Manchel emerges from these pages as an individual with a true and abiding passion for the subject and his desire to outline a healthy and ethical trajectory for this process is evident throughout the book.
He uses many examples taken from personal and professional experiences to illustrate his points for readers. Manchel, as well, includes building blocks for interested parties to use when embarking on the transitional process such as rules to follow – many of which, once again, will seem like common sense until he points out that our mistakes are often natural ones rather spurred by unethical motivations. The use of “devices” like the hypothetical case study guiding the first part of the book is an astute addition to an important work. “I Hereby Resign” Job Transitioning: How Individuals Properly Prepare, Resign and Move to the Competition, and How Companies Best Manage that Process is a tight accessible text written by a gifted educator and lawyer. It has near universal application and deserves consideration as the definitive take on the subject.
Clay Burton