What's the Book About?

We live in a world obsessed with ratings. We prefer to purchase 5-star products, read 5-star books, eat at 5-star restaurants, and watch 5-star movies. If you can relate to any of the following scenarios, you’re not about to give your career, as it stands today, a 5-star rating:

• You’re confused, conflicted, frustrated, or less than inspired about your career and/or where it’s heading.
• You find yourself too often relaxing on a comfy couch Netflix binging with stray popcorn kernels in the folds of your favorite sweatpants when you should be job hunting or working from home.
• You often sit, zoned out, in your corner office-variety leather chair wearing a designer outfit, knowing how blessed you are to have such a fantastic job, yet also knowing it’s not what you want to do.
• You’re generally dissatisfied with your career; it’s just not what you envisioned, it doesn’t exist at all, or you feel like a fake who’s going to get caught at any moment.
• You’re confident that you’re relatively smart and/or hardworking, but can’t seem to get ahead, and you can’t quite figure out why. Maybe you know why (or think you do) but don’t have a clue how to make changes, or lack the confidence required.
• The people you work with are all actual jerks and/or you seem to morph into a jerk, for some odd reason, every time you walk into the office or open your laptop.
• At this point, you suspect that you should settle for a decent salary and benefits but sense that there should be more to gain from all the crap you have to do every single day.
• No matter how hard you work, those who can impact your career don’t seem to appreciate it, or even fully understand what it is you’re doing. Worse, maybe you understand the lack of appreciation because you yourself feel that what you’re doing is ridiculous, boring, or like glorified busy work.
• Weird career-related stuff you can’t easily explain keeps happening. Whatever it is always ends up derailing your plan or otherwise holding you back. You feel like a magnet for bad luck.
• On top of it all, you’re not sure what a 5-Star career is for you; you’re feeling listless and uninspired, yet you want that career. Perhaps once you have it, you’ll know?
• You’re feeling a little, or a lot, ticked off that everyone around you appears to be either thriving in a unique career that seemed to develop naturally over time, or they have the sort of job that has a clear progression based on years of experience. They all seem to have 4 or 5-star careers but not you.

Industries across the globe manufacture products and provide services that you deem 5-star worthy; their goal is to satisfy your needs and desires. They follow the proven science of quality management to make that happen because it makes common sense, and its effectiveness is irrefutable. 5-Star Career: Define and Build Yours Using the Science of Quality Management provides common sense, strategic context for personally implementing quality concepts that reflect your goals as well as your own definition of a 5-star life and career.

This book provides the following benefits:

• Explains how the science of quality management can ensure customer satisfaction, which is what industry uses to gauge the quality of products and services.
• Relates that explanation to you on a personal level including how the basic concepts and components of the science apply to your career/job, the path is has taken, and can take.
• Challenges you to identify your authentic needs and desires following the through process, research methodology, and data analysis corporations rely on the understand their customers. Itl tells you how to do all of that, and provide a unique tool to help you gather and analyze the right type of data and information
• Clarifies the critical role that controlled systems and processes play in the science of quality management, the role they play in the personal application of quality management, and their surprising power to ensure intended outcomes.
• Explains how to apply the proven decision-making methodology (used by industry) to identify the best possible process that leads to the career you deem as 5-star worthy, and to address the career elements that will satisfy your authentic needs and desire
• Relays how risk-based decision making is not only key to identifying a process that ensure success, but also to addressing the unexpected curveballs that will surely come your way.

Penelope Przekop built a 30-year career around the science of quality management while struggling to overcome the uniquely disturbing childhood she shared with her brother. Along the way, she internalized the science used to build quality into products and services and discovered how it can be personally applied to build and manage not only the quality of a career but also the quality of a life. 

Career quest and 5-star movement-focused author, business process optimization expert, and expressionist artist, Penelope Przekop, spent the last twenty-five-plus years moving toward the authentic career, and life, she now enjoys.  After learning to apply the proven science of quality management, that changed the global economic landscape following World War II, and, more recently, ushered the 5-star rating system into our cultural consciousness, she began applying it to her personal life. In her upcoming book, 5-Star Career, Penelope introduces the science of quality management to readers, explains how it may be the missing link needed to finally get and stay on your best, authentic path, and shares how this amazing science played a key role in her years-long struggle to move beyond a deeply troubled childhood and suicide attempt at 19 to an authentic, happy adult enjoying a 5-star career. 

Penelope Przekop, MSQA, RQAP-GCP is the CEO of PDC Pharma Strategy. The boutique consulting firm partners with pharma and biotech companies to develop risk-based strategic solutions for corporate, clinical, and pharmacovigilance quality systems that support growth and ensure long-term compliance. Before transitioning to consulting, Penelope held leadership positions at Novartis, Covance, Wyeth, and Johnson & Johnson. As a consultant, she has held interim VP level and Chief Compliance Officer roles within the industry. She currently holds the role of Chief Compliance Officer for Engrail Therapeutics along with consulting projects for several other industry clients. 

Penelope earned a BS degree in Biology and MS degree in Quality Systems Engineering from Louisiana State University and Kennesaw State University, respectively. She's a graduate of the J&J/Smith College Customized Program for Women’s Leadership and the Rutgers University Senior Leadership Program for Professional Women. 

She’s the author of four novels and Six Sigma for Business Excellence (McGraw-Hill). She frequently writes, speaks, mentors, and delivers training on pharmaceutical industry quality and compliance topics.