Crowley, Katherine

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Attended Harvard University.

ADDRESSES: Office—K Squared Enterprises, 119 W. 23rd St., Ste. 1009, New York, NY 10011; fax: 212-929-6655. E-mail—Katherine@ksquaredenterprises.com.

CAREER: K Squared Enterprises and Small Business Strategy, Inc., New York, NY, co-owner, counselor, and business consultant, 1990–; has also worked as a psychotherapist.

WRITINGS:

(With Kathi Elster) Going Indie: Self-Employment, Freelance, and Tempting Opportunities, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1997.

(With Kathi Elster) Working with You Is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work, Warner Books (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS: Writers, business consultants, and public speakers Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster are strategists and consultants for small businesses. Together they own K Squared Enterprises, a company that offers management consulting and counseling services to new companies and small businesses. Crowley, a psychotherapist and counselor trained at Harvard, focuses on the internal landscape of businesses, helping new business owners endure the sometimes turbulent emotional highs and lows of entrepreneurship and assisting them in staying focused on business plans, personal vision, and lifestyle preferences. Elster, a former business executive, concentrates on the external, hands-on side of running a new business, helping new owners with strategic planning, sales and marketing, personnel issues, and career development.

Crowley and Elster are also authors. Their first book, Going Indie: Self-Employment, Freelance, and Tempting Opportunities, explores the many facets of freelancing, entrepreneurship, and self-employment. The book covers the fundamentals of independent employment, from the need to think like an entrepreneur to the necessity of overcoming anxiety about striking out on one's own and creating and implementing successful business plans and entrepreneurial ideas.

Working with You Is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work addresses a common lament of those who labor within the general workforce: overcoming conflict and emotional turmoil in the workplace. The book is a "highly practical and easily implemented guide" to overcoming emotionally draining, mentally taxing job relationships with coworkers, supervisors, and subordinates, reported a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Crowley and Elster identify a variety of roles that employees can play at work, whether voluntarily or unconsciously. These include hero, martyr, caretaker, rebel, peacemaker, and entertainer. All have varying degrees of advantages and disadvantages, but ultimately, playing such a role is limiting and prevents workers from achieving their full potential. Numerous case studies provide real-life examples of a wide assortment of situations that may be familiar to the book's readers. Crowley and Elster describe ways of dealing with emotional manipulation, handling bosses that can be too charming or overly demanding, and dealing with office saboteurs and gossips. Critically, they also outline ways of handling inevitable verbal confrontations that result from highly charged emotional situations. Booklist reviewer David Siegfried commented that Crowley and Elster's book is "short on analysis and long on ideas and examples to help you survive" the troubles that can emerge, sometimes unexpectedly, within office and business settings. The Publishers Weekly contributor concluded, "This empowering book delivers a sense of control over nasty workplace situations."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 1, 2006, David Siegfried, review of Working with You Is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work, p. 11.

Publishers Weekly, December 19, 2005, review of Working with You Is Killing Me, p. 53.

ONLINE

CNN Online, http://transcripts.cnn.com/ (March 4, 2006), transcript of television interview with Katherine Crowley.

K Squared Enterprises Web site, http://www.ksquaredenterprises.com (April 14, 2006).

Small Business Strategy, Inc. Web site, http://smallbusinessstrategy.com (April 14, 2006).

Time Warner Bookmark Web site, http://www.twbookmark.com/ (April 14, 2006), biography of Katherine Crowley.