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Title: Your Own Worst Enemy: How to Overcome Career Self-Sabotage by Andrew J. DuBrin ISBN: 0-8144-7861-1 Publisher: American Management Association Pub. Date: 01 September, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (3 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: A Laundry List of Workers Behaving Badly; Not Much Here
Comment: This book should not be confused with "Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement" by Kenneth W. Christian. That book deals specifically with the causes and symptoms of adult underachievement. This book is far less focused, and offers very little corrective advice.

The value the book does offer is in the questionnaire, early in the book, which seeks to identify negative beliefs and behaviors that will hold a person back in their career. But, the book proceeds to fail to capitalize on this insight. Instead, the book proceeds to provide a laundry list of various bad behaviors by workers, managers and executives, cobbled together as various types of "career self-sabotage."

Each "career self-sabotage" (mis)behavior includes an anecdote about someone indulging in the self-sabotage misstep in question. But after reading these anecdotes, I had to wonder: is the senior buyer in the book who actively solicits graft from suppliers an inadvertent career self-saboteur, or just an unethical jerk? Is the salesman in the book who propositions a married female customer an inadvertent career self-saboteur, or just a pig?

For the record, the senior buyer was fired, and the female customer rebuffed the piggish salesman and had his company blacklisted from future business. Well deserved consequences, but their transgressions were clearly not due to "career self-sabotage," but rather just poor personal character that happened to manifest themselves in the workplace.

There are other similar examples that the reader will probably not gain any personal insight from. The chapters on sex-related career self-sabotage are unintentionally funny: you shouldn't have an affair at work. Hey, thanks for the ground-breaking advice (sarcasm)! And the warning to female readers about avoiding "ultrafeminism" is badly outdated. I would hardly fault a female worker for not being polite to a male worker asking her on a date for the third time, and instead accurately labeling it as sexual harassment.

The final chapter offering a "master plan" to combat career self-sabotage is a very brief and disappointing end to the book.

However, as a final side note, the author deserves credit for labeling legend-in-his-own-mind basketball coach Rick Pitino as a "Commitment Breaker." The book was written prior to Pitino's arrogant and airheaded bungling as coach of the Boston Celtics.

I suggest taking this book out from the library and giving the other "Your Own Worst Enemy" book a closer look.

Rating: 4
Summary: A difficult confrontation with reality....
Comment: The author is a professor of management at RIT in Rochester, and a clinical psychologist. It is clear he has no love of post-modern therapy, because most of the self-sabotage that he talks about comes from the individuals themselves, and the scripts they bring to work, not their company, not the work demanded of them, and not from their circumstances. He is best in his insistence on confronting the individual's patterns of behavior, or, really, misbehavior, which stem from faulty self-esteem, faulty anger control, depression and political blunders. You get a sense he does not let his patients pull a lot over him; he confronts your shortcomings directly, and this is probably the essence of the book.

The problem is inside you, not your company or your work situation. If you are a victim, it is your own fault, and your own problem to fix.

I found the book very telling. My family members have suffered repeated demotions, firings, unhappiness at work, and divorces over the years. I have lost three excellent career opportunities due to self-sabotage. While I found the book telling, its prescriptions are remarkably simple: figure it out, get over it, and fly straight. Thus, his method is more cognitive and rational-emotional than analytical, but you know that, under the surface, he has dealt with a lot of personality disorders.

Rating: 3
Summary: chapter 2 makes the book
Comment: Chapter 2 of this book titled "Self-Sabotaging Life Scripts" was the most informative for me. The various case histories were also useful in demonstrating the different types of career sabotage. The questionnaire in chapter 1 isn't very useful because I've been fired numerous times from different jobs and commited self-sabotage, yet I scored very low in my self-sabotaging tendencies. Therefore, I don't think the questionnaire asks the right kinds of questions.

The unfortunate thing about books like this is that people don't read them until it is too late to make much of an impact on their career. Personally, I read this book after I've been fired numerous times and all but ruined my chances for a career comensurate with my background. I might not ever be able to have the same room for growth as I would have had if I hadn't sabotaged my career. Because of this book and my experiences however, it's unlikely that I will screw up what I have now and wind up worse.