Category Archives: Storytelling and Career

Stories of Escape from Corporate America

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Since one of the best aspects of Pamela Skillings’ Escape from Corporate America is its stories of people who successfully escaped, I’m running my review of the book that appeared on A Storied Career’s parent site, Quintessential Careers.


Escape from Corporate America


Escape from Corporate America: A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of Your Dreams,
by Pamela Skillings, $15. Paperback. 352 pages, 2008, Ballantine Books; ISBN: 0345499743

The most appealing aspect of Pamela Skillings’ Escape from Corporate
America — and the one that gives it the most credibility —
is the fact that she interviewed more than 200 people who successfully
escaped from jobs in big corporations that no longer suited them.
Not only does Skillings tell the stories of many of these escapees, but
she also lists them in the back of the book. The vast majority have Web sites,
thus providing the opportunity to learn more about these folks or perhaps
even contact them.

Escape is quite comprehensive, covering the full gamut of escape routes —
changing jobs into corporations that are known for being employee-friendly, cutting back to
part-time/flex-time, telecommuting, taking time off (such as a sabbatical), joining
a smaller company; working as a solopreneur; starting a business that’s more
then a solo enterprise, working to make a difference in a job or organization dedicated to the greater good, and following creative passions
in such areas as music, acting, writing, filmmaking, and art.

Skillings also spends a good chunk of the book helping the reader determine
if he or she truly needs and is ready for an escape from corporate life.
She even offers a quiz to help readers determine if it’s time to get out.
The book is full of reader-friendly tidbits, quotes, lists, resources, and
stories in sidebars. A Timeline of Corporate Malaise (beginning in 1298
with the founding of the world’s oldest surviving business corporation — Sweden’s Stora
Kopperberg) is revealing. The author’s Financial Planning Worksheets for Career
Changers seem quite comprehensive and are bound to be more than helpful
to the reader considering transcending the rat race.
Skillings also injects the volume copiously with humor,
such as including music playlists for miserable cubicle dwellers (“Back on the Chain Gang,” for example) and those fantasizing about leaving (“Take This Job and Shove It,” naturally).

Here are the Top 10 Things I learned from reading Escape from Corporate
America:

1. Studies show 50 percent of workers are dissatisfied with their jobs,
and 80 percent fantasize about quitting; however, those in corporate jobs
are more miserable than workers in smaller companies, who are more miserable
than free agents and entrepreneurs.

2. The phases of corporate disillusionment that Skillings describes
are not too different from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ well-known stages of grief when people
are told they are terminally ill:

  • Honeymoon phase (no counterpart in Kubler-Ross’ model)
  • Denial (same in Kubler-Ross’ model)
  • Bitching (anger in Kubler-Ross’ model)
  • Bargaining (same)
  • Depression (same)
  • Acceptance or Change (happily, you can make
    a change if you’re miserable in a corporate career — unlike the
    inevitable outcome in Kubler-Ross’ model.)

3. Money is surprisingly unimportant to life satisfaction, Skillings
reports, citing a study in which moving from the bottom to the top
of the income scale increased overall satisfaction of participants
by only about 10 percent.

4. Americans get the skimpiest vacations of all industrialized nations — 8.1 days a year after 10 years on the job.

5. Skillings’ three-step plan for determining one’s perfect
career is compact and nifty: (1) Identify your career fantasy; (2)
Conduct detective work; and (3) Try on your dream job. She also
provides handy worksheets for these endeavors. While I love the fact
that she mentions picking the brains of people in the jobs you
are considering, I wish she had more explicitly discussed the
relatively unknown and underused
informational-interview
technique. Informational interviews are also helpful in the
detective-work phase. Continue reading →