Recommended Resources

Pamela Slim, a former corporate manager and entrepreneur, began the Escape From Cubicle Nation blog in 2005, to help frustrated employees stuck in corporate jobs. She quickly developed a dedicated following and attracted mainstream press such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, US News & World Report and Psychology Today. Her blog is growing rapidly and is syndicated by USA Today, Foxnews.com, Neilson, Hoovers and NBC affiliates across the nation. She is also a professional life coach, trained by columnist Martha Beck, and writes for Martha’s blog.

Despite grim headlines about the economy, you don’t have to stay in a job you intensely hate. There’s a better opportunity waiting out there, and escaping from cubicle nation is easier than you think. Pamela Slim spent a decade traveling all over the country as a self-employed trainer for large corporations. She was surprised to find that many of the most successful employees at these companies harbored secret dreams of breaking out to start their own businesses. They would pull her aside after a meeting and whisper, “I would love to work for myself, but have no idea how to get started. How did you do it?” So Pamela started a blog — Escape from Cubicle Nation — to share her experience and advice. Soon, questions and stories poured in from corporate prisoners around the world. As her blog gained popularity, she also interviewed some of the brightest experts in entrepreneurship on topics from finance to branding to marketing via social networks. This audiobook includes Pamela’s very best material, based on thousands of conversations and reader submissions. It provides everything you’ll need to consider a major change — not just the nuts and bolts of starting a business, but a full discussion of the emotional issues involved. Pamela knows firsthand that leaving corporate life can be very scary, especially if you have a family and other obligations. Fears and self-defeating thoughts often hold people back from pursuing an extremely gratifying solo career. Get ready to learn your real options, make an informed decision, and maybe, just maybe, escape from cubicle nation.

A wave of business innovation is driving the productivity resurgence in the U.S. economy. In Wired for Innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders describe how information technology directly or indirectly created this productivity explosion, reversing decades of slow growth. They argue that the companies with the highest level of returns to their technology investment are doing more than just buying technology; they are inventing new forms of organizational capital to become digital organizations. These innovations include a cluster of organizational and business-process changes, including broader sharing of information, decentralized decision-making, linking pay and promotions to performance, pruning of non-core products and processes, and greater investments in training and education.

Drawing on work done at the MIT Center for Digital Business and elsewhere, Brynjolfsson and Saunders explain how to better measure the value of technology in the economy. They treat technology as not just another type of ordinary capital investment by also focusing on complementary investments – including process redesign, training, and strategic changes – and on the value of product quality, timeliness, variety, convenience, and new products.

Copyright protects original works of authorship, meaning just about everything written, composed, scored, scripted, drawn, painted, sculpted, choreographed, or architected. No formalities are required to obtain copyright protection – it applies automatically from the moment each work is created or fixed in a tangible medium of expression, whether that medium is computer memory, paper, and pencil, or paper mâché.

Copyright protects against unauthorized copying of an original work. Note that this is much thinner protection than that afforded by a patent. You can sue an innocent patent infringer and win, even if the defendant has never heard of you, your patent, or the underlying invention; it is enough that they make, use, or sell an infringing product. With copyright, you may only sue those who actually copy your original work, by making a digital copy, for example, or by producing a work of their own that is substantially similar to yours after having