Recommended books

It’s no wonder why the topics of business continuity and risk and crisis management are chock full of books. The world has gone through a series of various crises in the past two decades that seem to foretell worse times ahead. So these topics are finding a growing audience.

Quest Publishing is contributing to the rising interest with its own series of books. Two of them, Personal Reconstruction and Your Plan Is Your Parachute, are considered seminal works for handling personal and organizational crises, around which we expect many more projects will yield a universe of books that specifically address particular types of crises or difficult times, like economic crashes or pandemics. 

We recommend the following three books to satiate your interest in risk and crisis management, or, better yet, to avoid or navigate such difficulties in your personal lives or business.

Your Plan Is Your Parachute, written by Quest Publishing’s founder, Jacques Island, is now in its second edition. This book is neither a short checklist of “things to do to get ready for a crisis” nor a lengthy, arcane tome that only a crisis manager would read or understand. It is to the point and chock-full of templates to get the uninitiated manager through the task of producing an organization’s business continuity plan—your business parachute—in a day’s time. It is also the perfect text book for use in a BCP workshop or course. Among the many tools and information are templates for creating a threat and risk assessment, early warning system, risk mitigation strategies, crisis response program, business impact assessment, and business continuity strategies. This book has what you need to deal effectively with natural disasters like wind storms, pandemics, or tsunamis, or human-caused ones like product sabotage, lawsuits, or terrorism. We can be sure that the string of calamities that we have had to cope with will repeat themselves, not to mention the ones that we have yet to face. 

Personal Reconstruction, written by four experts in the fields of mental health, spirituality, personal finances, and law, teaches methods for averting personal crises and for recovering from the ones you experience. Although the book’s audience can include anyone, it is focused on common issues for four main categories of people at different stages of life: adolescents,k midlifers, the elderly, and those afoul of the law. Each lesson in the book includes exercises and worksheets to help the reader in several ways: Identify personal risks that can turn into crises, assess the likely causes of an existing crisis, formulate strategies for avoiding an managing crises, and create an action plan for recovering from an ongoing crisis. By the end of Personal Reconstruction you’ll have a good understanding of the factors that affect your happiness. You’ll also know which actions you can take before you suffer a crisis, and you’ll have tools and strategies for recovery that you can apply after experiencing a personal ciris that you do not avert.

Personal Resilience, written by Peter Tarlow and Séverine Obertelli, is our newest release. It came in the middle of COVID-19, a pandemic that just seems to persist with new, more lethal and more contagious variants of itself to assure its continued death march through the world. Yes, the world, and particularly Americans, are weary of the requisite sacrifices to beat this virus. Personal Resilience is the book we need to better understand pandemics and better cope with them. This book’s discussions about the nature of pandemics and their effects are not only educational. Each chapter also ends with a series of questions and answers about pandemics and strategies for coping with the challenges that pandemics and similar emergencies thrust upon us.