Four Hour Workweek

I just finished the The Four Hour Work Week, a book that's currently topping the best seller lists. Mary originally bought it and I picked it up after she was done. From the numbers it seems there's a lot of people out there who want to break loose from the

As Mary pointed out when she read it, the book seems to offer a lot of insights that have been culled from other sources, and not in a terribly well organized manner either. Some of the concepts the author lists are fairly common knowledge in engineering and manufacturing fields.

Yet, as Mary commented later, the book wasn't without merit. Based on some advice in the book, she did take a long look at many of her vendors and customers and started culling those who required more effort then the returns justified.

The section that interested me was the one on adopting a global lifestyle while maintaining a business. Unfortunately there wasn't much of real use here except for a list of websites that I am planning on checking out. We've been discussing whether or not we can get away and live somewhere else for one or more months a year and still keep MouseSavers.com up and running. This is exactly what the author is doing himself, but he encourages one to think they can do it without having to actually work or anything so gauche. While I admire his ability to run a business without having to do much of anything, most businesses do not lend themselves to this type of hands-off philosophy in the long term. Still, with an effective Internet connection, we probably can run the business from almost anywhere effectively, and the book does bear this out to some degree.

Overall, my main complaint is that it isn't clear right from the get go that the recommendations and advice noted in the book aren't for everyone - or even for more than a rather narrow cross section of the population. Work in a factory? This book isn't for you. Work on a farm? Nada. Run a retail store? No help here. As a matter of fact the majority of people right now who live 9 to 5 jobs will not find much of use in this book.

The author seems to suffer from a lack of understanding of modern day corporate dynamics. The whole section on how to shift your job from the office to the home is hardly relevant to any of the workplaces I've been involved in. For instance, one recommendation was to use software to access your work computer from home and demonstrate that you can accomplish more from home. Many workplaces nowadays don't allow remote access to work place computers and especially networks because of the security risks. And the whole proposal for shifting one's self out of the office and working from home really runs against the empire building tendencies of almost every mid-level supervisor I ever encountered. Oh, and from personal experience - if you're not in the office you automatically become the easiest person to let go during the latest downsizing, regardless of your work output. So I would probably take the recommendations as to how to divorce yourself from the office with a really large gain of salt.