Surviving Your Serengeti

What caught my eye for this book was the subtitle: 7 Skills to Master business and Life. After all, who doesn’t want to have more skills in life and especially in being more of a success in business. I’d like to have more success in business, yes I would. What is my business, you ask? Well…….I sew. And I sew about anything. But to market something I sew and to make money at it, well, that is another story. So I eagerly started reading this book with success in mind because now I was going to learn skills to help me. Course I completely missed the main title of the book starting with ‘SURVIVING…..’!!!!

So I start reading and this book has my immediate attention. It has an engaging story and is wrapped around the reality of living, I mean surviving the Serengeti Plains of East Africa as an animal. I will not go into the example of each animal mentioned because that is for you to read about. But let me say that by the time I got to the 4th animal, my focus changed. Because instead of seeing how these animal characteristics related to my business skills, I also started to relay them to my church and how we could use these examples there. Because a church that is surviving is a subject that every ministry involved person is interested in.

So I changed my purpose for reading the book, concentrating on how it would relate to church effectiveness and I read, “You must constantly be on the lookout for ‘inefficiency’ in the project and perhaps most important, you must adopt a proactive attitude by taking the following actions: Avoid multitasking, and learn to say no.” WHOA!!! Is that even allowed in church ministry? THEN it said to “Delegate tasks to others where appropriate. Look for ways to improve systems and processes.” Now please do not take this out of context. You really need to read the whole book and apply it to your own situation, whether business or some aspect of your life. In conclusion the book challenges you to identify which animal you are. Do it. You may be surprised at what you find out!!


I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers for an advance reading as part of their Booksneeze bloggers program . I was not required to write a positive review and therefore, the book review is 100% my own opinion.