Drawing on her experience as personal and executive assistant to George Stephanopoulos during Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and first term, Heather Beckel offers straightforward advice on how to dazzle them now to get ahead later. With clarity and wit, Beckel guides readers from their first day to becoming a manager, intermingling her real-life experiences from the office of all offices-The White House. Whether it's developing organizational strategies or a painful lesson in discretion, Heather Beckel has been there. Chapters include € When Your Boss is a Jerk € Give Good Phone € Getting Personal with Your Boss € Be a Manager and Know Your Universe € and much more.
A Reader: I have been working as an assistant for the last twelve years and I felt that I needed to review the "core essentials" of my profession and pick up any techniques that I might have missed or forgotten along the way.
This is an excellent book for anyone who wishes to take stock of their career and review the essentials of what they actually do for a living. The approach of covering everything from first day, first job and career progression is excellent - no matter how much career history an assistant brings to a new job, until she manages to establish in her boss' mind that the new assistant is compentent, the new assistant might as well be a raw rookie.
For the record, the book contains a fair amount of information that will not be particularly useful for readers outside the USA (time zones, telephone numbers, etc). So, unless your boss does a lot of business travelling to the US, the parent company is US based, or the company has a lot of US based clients - these sections are not particularly useful.
I, too, bought the e-book and I would recommend that if time is on your side, buy this book in hardcopy format as it just cries out for a collection of post-it notes, annotations and needs its spine broken in a photocopier.
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