Stefan Swanepoel

Title: Surviving the Serengeti: 7 Skills to Master Business and Life
Author: Stefan Swanepoel
Publisher: Wiley Publishing

Looking back, I'm not quite sure what I expected when I agreed to review "Surviving your Serengeti: 7 skills to Master Business and Life." It bills itself as "A Fable of Self-Discovery," that teaches seven skills to business and life and who doesn’t want to learn more and better way to master life?
This book is a story of a couple caught up in today's economy crisis with job losses and business failures. The wife has won a trip through her employer and chooses the Serengeti as their destination. The husband reluctantly accompanies her but his mind is on his failing business back home. Once they have reached the Serengeti and the husband realizes there is no he accepts that he should enjoy the time away and forget about the troubles back home. During the book the husband meets an old college roommate, who is one of the owners of the camp, and he becomes engaged with the environment, the animals, and his college roommate who leads him into some self-evaluation by observing the animals of the Serengeti.
I was disappointed that the other two couples introduced in the first chapter turned out to be nothing more than the laying of background for the author. We didn’t see those two couples again until the end of the book where they seemed to be used as a sounding board for the two main characters.

The book discusses seven Serengeti animals and the survival skill(s) they posses that help them to not only survive but thrive. These skills are also necessary qualities that each of us as humans can possess but often don't know we have or else we never fully develop. I had some trouble equating some of the animal behaviors to human qualities. Overall, the analogies really didn’t work well in my mind, at least not for me.
I was provided this book by the publisher through BookSneeze for an honest and unbiased review. The opinions are my own.… (mehr)