Shocking statistical warning: By some estimates, more than 20 million jobs disappeared in the developed world during the global financial crisis and its aftermath. Job-hunters the world over are now facing up to the grimly inevitable realisation that 'employment' might be on its way to becoming an obsolete economic term.
Author Geoff Burch posits that more and more of us will have to turn to self-employment to earn a living income. And he's probably right.
The first impression of his sixth book is positive. Its cover, inspired by the Socialist Realism art-poster genre that was ubiquitous in the Soviet Union and in Mao's China, promises boldly provocative reading.
Unfortunately, it fails to deliver. Much of Self-Made Me consists of truisms, aphorisms, and statements of the painfully obviously. Burch is fond of metaphors, and this book is bursting with them: workers pedalling on a single giant bicycle, beehive factories, companies as steam engines, the self-employed as guerillas.
Burch is a British business guru who has written a number of fairly successful titles, including Resistance Is Useless, Go It Alone, Writing On The Wall, and The Way of the Dog.
He is also the star of the modestly successful BBC TV show, All Over The Shop, which is an instructive series for small businesses. Burch is quite the raconteur, although he's one of those guys who thinks that adopting a shrill-old-grandma accent makes his 'gags' funnier. In other words, he can be annoying in large doses.
But some serious business wisdom lies beneath his wise-guy persona. And Burch is in demand in the public-speaking circuit, on a vast range of business topics. Whatever you think of his shtick, he is a consummate self-made success story himself.
