Careers, 111pp, Capstone publishing, £13.99
Polar Bear Pirates is the self-help careers book for the Nintendo generation, helping some useful medicine go down with a very large spoonful of irony. It's written in the style of a manual for a Mario Bros style video game, a race to the mythical Fat City of a successful and fulfilling career.
The first thing you notice about it is that it's full of cartoons of the Polar Bear Pirates, and their workplace enemies, the Head-Treads, Molasses-Men, Sinkers, Bloaters and Neg-Ferrets. Phil Williams' illustrations for it are great eye candy, setting the tone for the text perfectly, even if they don't directly help with any explanations.
The second thing you'll probably notice is that it's really rather short. Just over 100 pages, and those are largely illustrations or spacing. Before you start checking your change from £15, it's worth saying that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, the book rattles through topics at a good pace, cramming a lot more into a few well written paragraphs than many authors manage with a page. The whole thing is excellently designed, with short chapters, good colours, and cartoons pushing home the points without ever making you feel like you're working at it.
You'll be guaranteed to smirk a bit at Webster's wise-crack filled prose. as evident right from the very first lines of the book:
"Fat City is where the winners live. Most people who live there come from Rock Bottom. No one has ever moved there from Complacency; that's where the Norms live, and to get there you go half way up the hill and turn off. The Nobodies all live in Quitter; it's easy to reach. You just stop."
The book's main strength is in identifying weaknesses. You'll likely spot a couple of your own, and of people around you, and get some clues as to their motivation. Webster's gung-ho determination to be top of the office foodchain can be a little scary, and a lot of the advice boils down basically to:
There are some good tips on working in teams, or managing projects, which are not exactly revolutionary, but are dressed up in such accessible terms, with lots of silly but memorable acronyms (such as TNTs for Tiny Noticeable Things, or DOT for Diversity of Thought). The book makes constant reference to the PBP website, which is basically a set of bulletin boards where Webster hopes people will share their own examples of good practice in the categories reflected in the book. It's empty at the moment, but it's a very new book, so we'll be charitable and give it a little time to develop. The boards are visible even if you don't have the book, but Webster's structuring of the site around the book's many acronyms mean that you'll be foxed without a copy - clever!
Webster's former careers as sales rep, milkman, and riot policeman have given him a more interesting route to management consultancy than most, but has possibly helped him to come up with a perfect self-help career book for people who'd never read self-help careers books.
