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To succeed in business today, you must be strong, smart, competitive, resilient, tenacious, and fearless. If you want to be heard at work, you must speak up. If you want to drive change, you need an action plan. If you want to keep your job in an increasingly competitive world, you must show on a daily basis how you add value to your company. In short, if you want to succeed, you need good, old-fashioned backbone. Using straight talk laced with wry humor, top business consultant Susan Marshall highlights skills every businessperson can learn and sharpen to become stronger, more confident, and more influential on the job.

"This book demands that you sit up straight and pay attention. It provides practical and insightful guidelines for gaining control in a workplace typified by chaos, complexity, and rapid change. Marshall challenges us to grow into ourselves—creating a backbone of conviction and strength that allows each of us to take command of our futures." —Paul Sanders, Director, Lessons in Leadership

Ann Louise Gittleman

Janet Dailey

Ann Patchett

Louise Erdrich

Backbone--it's that elusive quality that drives business success; it's the guts to speak up and to do things out of the box. Marshall's program is subtitled "10 Strategies for Gaining Power and Influence at Work." She laments ineffective meetings and lack of support from colleagues, and recommends taking notes and asking questions. Despite a valiant effort to add variation to her tone, Anna Fields, reading the script at an even, slow pace, fails to enliven a dull, drawn-out subject, although she improves some by the second half. A much shorter audio and a more animated narrator would greatly improve this book. A.G.H. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine