The Compass and the Radar: The Art of Building a Rewarding Career While Remaining True to Yourself, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of The Compass and the Radar: The Art of Building a Rewarding Career While Remaining True to Yourself by Paolo Gallo available from Amazon here.

Paolo Gallo offers a unique pathway toward identifying the right career, finding the ideal job and developing a moral compass–the solid value system that will then anchor the reader in their professional lives.

With a creative and engaging mix of coaching practice, management theories, case studies and personal story-telling, this book helps readers to identify both their own compass–which relates to integrity, passion and internal value systems–and radar–which helps them to understand organisational complexity and ‘read’ workplace dynamics and situations.

The Compass of Success is founded on a series of searching questions that will enable anyone to find their compass and radar to achieve personal success:

· How can I find out what my real strengths and talents are?
· Do I love what I do?
· How can I find a job with a company that truly reflects my values?
· What are the prices I am willing to pay for a meaningful and rewarding career?
· How should I define a successful career?

This book is one from the heart. Gallo has had a long and successful career, by many standards, but he is also conscious of some failings and bad judgements along the way. The structure of the book carefully takes you through the whole process of finding and assessing which work is right for you. With every step of the process though, Gallo is also deeply concerned with analysing what is the right thing to do, from a life as well as work perspective.

Gallo has worked with many perceived high flyers, who, ultimately realised that they had been chasing the wrong dream, and working for the wrong people and the wrong organisations. He even considers several examples where the road ended in suicide, or broken hearts in terms of wives/husbands, children and families neglected by people with too much drive and too little balance.

These concerns illustrate the choice of his title, demonstrating that we need both a compass and a radar to ensure that we make the right decisions when it comes to work, and who we chose to work for. While we might expect others to share the same work and moral values, time and time again his examples illustrate that this would be a risky assumption.

If you want to leverage the benefit of Gallo’s hard earned lessons then this is a smart book to read. It is also written in an accessible, engaging and non jargonistic way, so that it offers value to all readers, from CEOs to those just starting out. Live the life you want to live, before it is too late and you have spent 28 years working on someone else’s dream, as happened to one of his subjects.

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