How To Wine With Your Boss: & 6 Other Tips To Fast Track Your Career By: Tiffany Yarde| Book Review

How To Wine With Your Boss: & Six Other Tips To Fast Track Your Career
By: Tiffany Yarde
Genre: Advice, Social Mobility, Wine, Career Development, Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 stars
Release Date: June 19, 2018
Publisher: Prodigy Gold Books

Goodreads | Amazon | B&N|

Synopsis:

Fourteen years of working in highly competitive international corporations will teach a person a lot about relationships, politics, and the “natural order” of things. There’s no one way to the top of a respective field but there are tactics that many people employ to build trust and to make sure their hard work doesn’t go unnoticed. “How to Wine With Your Boss” teaches you about positioning, tact, and how to tool your passions.

Wine is Tiffany’s story. For much of her career in accounting, marketing, and human resources, she has used her wine knowledge to connect with people. Inside, she takes readers through the journey of how she built relationships with colleagues who didn’t come from where she came from or necessarily saw the world through her lens. She gives readers an opportunity to build professional development skills while demystifying “wine enthusiasm” and potentially helping readers gain a new curiosity on the subject. People don’t grow in isolation; they grow with other people, so join Tiffany on this wine trip through grape regions, styles, and wine parties. While on the road, she’ll share the bumps she hit, and the resilience she fostered along the way

Book Review:

I loved reading How To Wine With Your Boss; the author covers a ton of helpful and relevant topics from mentors to networking, confidence building, finding a professional and personal balance in life, corporate culture, micro-aggression and of course a number of useful details about wine.

With the few topics I specifically want to draw attention to from this book, I first wanted to say how great I felt every subject covered in this book was–from start to finish. Simply because Yarde offers insightful, helpful, and motivational material with a genuinely sincere and honest tone. Moreover, written in a gender-neutral manner as to not isolate potential readers, making it the perfect book to share with my brothers and all of my friends.

A Book For Everyone:

How To Wine With Your Boss should, in my opinion, go on the ultimate list of books to have/read when you are looking for something that will help you to revamp your career and professional networking approach, self-confidence, self-evaluation or you if just want a light-hearted, crash course on wine–this would be the book for you.

Whether you are an intern or a pretty “seasoned” professional in the career world, it is the kind of book you might find yourself rereading, memorizing or carrying around with you long after reading it (like I did).

On a personal level, How To Wine With Your Boss felt like the perfect book suited to my lifestyle and career as a freelancer but with the next-step-guide, I need to transition into a new career venture. Reading this book also felt like a personal journey that would have been detrimental to my twenty-three-year-old-self trying to find her way a few years ago.

Pat Yourself On The Back, You’ve Earned It:

As Yarde’s steps and proposed accomplishment journal idea definitely felt like a self-journey an eye-opener for me as she discusses how branding or re-branding yourself to put your best career-foot forward is by putting your best self forward by showcasing your gifts, skills, and passions. Which is where the accomplishment journal comes in to play as it allows you to put all of the obstacles or goals you have already conquered in front of you, on to a page, that may have gone unrealized.

And it doesn’t have to be work/career centered accomplishments but personal, little ones–even from daily, weekly and yearly to-do lists–that you put down. When I started to do this, I was amazed by how long the list and my entries became in just a short time. This practice of accomplishment journaling with the physical representation of measuring one’s worth, value and potential will stick with you long after finishing the book.

Your Best Self Forward:

As you may be able to tell while reading this book I got really caught up in the journaling assignments, so-to-speak, that Yarde also proposes for the reader to journal/organize their experiences, their successes, and future plans/goals and aspirations. So, and I’m paraphrasing here, that it can be easier to meet others “where they are” to build a level of trust and connection. Your resume or CV can only represent a fraction of the person you are, so you need to be prepared to show others the rest.

Something else I loved about How To Wine With Your Boss, was the way Yarde presents the quality over quantity aspect when it comes to career growth and connections. And how developing those quality relationships can spur from like-minded interests or unique, personal stories you share to strike up a conversation—once again, putting your best self forward.

Yarde also offers methods of using a similar variant of this approach to connect with a potential mentor(s) by finding a way to build a relationship with something the two of you have in common.

Wine: The Bridge Between:

Using her love and knowledge of wine to not only teach the reader about the subject, Yarde uses it as a bridging example of how to develop inner-office and professional connections with others based off of her own experiences. This element of the book is sure to give you a wonderful crash-course insight on wine and guaranteed to also have you eager to go out and pick up a few fun bottles to try yourself ^__^.

As a frequent wine drinker myself, I have been trying to bring my mom onto the bandwagon of drinking more wine, but what I enjoyed so much about these portions of the book was realizing the regions I prefer most when it comes to wine (Italy, New Zealand & France). On top of that, knowing where to locate them on the shelf if I am unable to ask a store clerk for more detailed information on a bottle (which has happened).

Making The List:

As a list maker and a strict calendar organizer, I give Yarde a huge nod of appreciation for including helpful tips for those entrepreneurs, creators, interns and career-driven individuals who struggle with keeping schedules and routines. Because with any project, goal, assignment or task, no matter how big or small, having a good plan for execution (and sticking to that plan) from start-to-finish determines how successful the outcome will be.

What is also important to realize, and Yarde brings this up as well, is that having a balance between work and your personal life (when you’re organized) helps you do better, feel better and accomplish a lot more down the line.

At the risk of being repetitive here, I am going to wrap up this review/opinion post by saying I believe How To Wine With Your Boss should go the ultimate list of books to have/read when you are looking for something that will help you to revamp your career and professional networking approach, self-confidence, self-evaluation, your branding methods and of course—your love of wine.

About The Author:

“I love wine. It’s a beverage that transcends socioeconomic walls and anyone, from any walk of life, can find common ground over the subject. It’s a great way to connect with people.”

Tiffany Yarde is a wine specialist who founded Motovino, a NYC-Certified M/WBE company, after spending a decade in accounting, operations, marketing and business development roles for global organizations. Her experience ranges from having launched offices in overseas markets to driving social media strategies and business development plans for over 80 executives of international companies. She also managed growth initiatives, product launches, staff development training, diversity and inclusion efforts, recruitment programs, job design, and firm-wide brand strategy for several law firms, startups, and service professionals.

Tiffany is committed to helping professionals obtain personal growth and a satisfying lifestyle. She has turned her accomplishments into a toolkit to help organizations foster team cohesion and results for other professional development initiatives. Her programs also support professional adults interested in gaining control of their upward mobility and a competitive edge in their careers.

Tiffany is a member of the Society of Wine Educators and a WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) certificate holder.