Books

Cool-Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time

Effective time management is way more than just making lists. It’s about proactively managing situations, nurturing human relationships, exerting influence, and managing expectations. My book Cool-Time is a complete approach to managing time and defending it from the endless demands and expectations of others in the workplace, and in work from home scenarios.

This third edition is revised and updated from the first edition, published by John Wiley & Sons in 2005, as well as the second edition that followed in 2015. It delivers an updated perspective for the “post-pandemic new normal, hybrid workplace” era. It includes suggestions on non-work activities including healthy sleep, as well as new techniques around life-work integration and lessons learned from the pandemic. This makes it a complete approach to managing time and balancing life. It’s available at Lulu.com.

The Future Of Workplace Fear: How Human Reflex Stands In The Way Of Digital Transformation

“Less of an out-and-out leadership advice book and more of a meditation on the tenets of what makes up corporate innovative phobias, Prentice writes with a sense of precision and skill…it’s peppered with fun references and a wry sense of humor.”
Garth Thomas, Hollywood Digest, June 6, 2022 – Full review.

People who study and discuss the future of work and digital transformation tend to focus on the technologies themselves, with a presumption that the working population will embrace them willingly. But humans have not evolved enough over the past 10,000 years to overcome a single complicating truth: we are still governed by instinctive fear.

For organizations, this means the human response to digital transformation, specifically the fear of change, the fear of commitment, even the fear of working relationships (e.g. manager-employee), not only has the potential to slow progress in the near future but has already done so. The results include tangible problems such as ransomware incidents, cyberattacks, employee turnover, loss of competitiveness, loss of market share, resistance, sabotage, discrimination, and litigation.

Available for sale at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and many other online bookstores. You can also pick up the eBook from Apress via SpringerLink.

“It’s not often books of this nature are able to mix so many interesting and psychodynamic elements into the text. But Prentice makes time for pretty much everything, and it results in a literary experience that is as informative as it is genuinely page-turning.”
Colin Jordan, Medium, June 7, 2022 – Full review.

This book is intended to speak to managers and employees alike on the impact of the various types of fear that can occur in the workplace, and how they are often interconnected in a way that condemns most organizations to mediocrity or defeat despite the technological innovations all around them. The book will use case studies, examples, and most importantly, techniques for addressing these fears most effectively.

David Spark of CISOseries.com delivers an enthusiastic review. Check it out on LinkedIn.

What you’ll learn

Where fear comes from and how it manifests itself in the body and mind.
A summary of the most common types of fears that occur in relation to work.
How fear interacts with technology, change and digital transformation.
How to address and manage fear individually and as a group.
The sources of fears such as the fear of change and develop change management strategies that appeal to employees on individual and team levels.
How fear manifests itself in the body and mind as primarily a self-defense reflex and how a century of “modern age work” has a hard time working against this.
Predictable fear-based activity concepts, for example, the Kubler-Ross change curve and the contagion of emotion in crowds, and then apply these to establish a project plan of proactive fear management.
How the demands of modern employees for tailored work-life environments, paired with a knowledge of fear management can create a competitive and forward-looking organization that combines technology with the best of human motivation.
How to develop research skills for “knowing what you don’t know” in terms of discovering latent fears within a workforce.
How to apply fear management skills to all levels of the workforce, including senior managers and young executives whose new-age fears, such as that of face-to-face interaction with employees stems from an internet-age upbringing.
How to manage issues such as procrastination, productivity, team communication and collaboration, all of which can be held back through fear of inability, intimacy, progress, and many other sources.

“By shrinking things down to such a base set of essentials, then building his arguments, observations, and articulation of the facts from the ground up, Prentice hits multiple home runs in single sentences, and in distinctive sentence structure choices.”
Cyrus Rhodes, The Magic Pen, June 27, 2022 – Full review.

Who this book is for

This book is essential for managers who wish to look under the hood and understand how people respond to the changes in their immediate world, and why most of those responses are negative, and also for individual employees who seek to understand why they, or their colleagues or managers generally respond negatively to changes, or who struggle with conflict and relationships in the workplace and how to create an action plan to improve the situation.

“It’s through this kind of bell-clear, eloquent, but concise prose and overall house style that Prentice is able to draw pretty much any kind of reader profile in. You never feel iced out or talked down to.”
Nicole Killian, MobYorkCity.com, June 27, 2022 – Full review.