Personal-finance

First, he details the bad news: AQ is hardwired into you during your youth by parental models and early experiences. But the good news--that your AQ can be improved and put to work on your job--is the promise this book capably delivers. Stoltz, an organizational communications expert who has measured the Adversity Quotient of 100,000 people, is fond of using mountain-climbing metaphors to describe elements of organizational adversity. For example, low AQers are "quitters" who have given up the climb or "campers" who have found a safe, shady spot. But for the resilient high AQers, "the climbers," there ain't no mountain high enough.

The lower your AQ, the more of a toll job stress will take, warns Stoltz, whose assessment tools for measuring AQ are as detailed as his strategies for creating a "climbing culture" in your organization. The pages are packed with maps, self-assessments, specific strategies, and smart end-of-chapter summaries. This hands-on approach is undermined at times by too many metaphors, acronyms, and lists, as well as a tendency to oversell AQ as a predictor of success. Still, for executives, managers, and employees alike, The Adversity Quotient @ Work is a supportive and strategic home-schooling course for coping with the demands of today's workplace.--Barbara Mackoff

Author Paul G. Stoltz, Ph.D., says individual AQs explain why some people, no matter what their intelligence or educational or social background, succeed where others fail. It's been used in workshops for Olympic athletes and at companies including Deloitte & Touche, Minnesota Power, and U.S. West. Defined as the measure of one's resilience and ability to persevere in the face of constant change, stress, and difficulty, AQ is touted as "the most important factor in achieving success." Stoltz also calls it an indicator of one's general ambitiousness, creativity, happiness, energy, and physical and emotional health; he therefore recommends that business executives use the book's guidelines to pinpoint top performers in the workplace.

While the book is filled with acronyms and buzzwords (LEAD, "unconscious incompetence," ARP, and CO2RE among them), the book's tests--reminiscent of Myers-Briggs questionnaires--are fun to take and easy to analyze. Stoltz has given the tests to nearly 8,000 people, so he obviously knows what he's talking about here. He offers specific advice on how to cultivate AQ in employees, and, perhaps even more useful, 22 ways to crush the AQs of your followers. (One of them, "Be consistently inconsistent," could explain many "Dilbert" strips!)

While Stoltz derives many of his ideas from psychologist Abraham Maslow, psychologist and Learned Optimism author Martin Seligman, and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People writer Stephen R. Covey, he gives credit where it's due, and he's done an outstanding job of synthesizing various classic and contemporary theories into one solidly inspirational book.