This playbook by a high-level executive at Google not only tells readers how to achieve better outcomes, but also exactly what to do, step-by-step, to overcome the most common personal and professional obstacles, from negotiating a raise to finding a mentor to landing a first date.
THE CHASE:
An Unconventional, Uninhibited, and Unapologetic Approach to Getting What You Want in Life
by Jenny Wood
Portfolio, TBD
(via Writers House)
Jenny Wood was working at Google for more than ten years when she set her sights on a much bigger role in the company. It took more than six months and sixty internal coffee chats for Jenny to go from Manager of Analytical Leads, a member of a seven-person sales team, to Head of U.S. West Coast Technical Operations, leading a team of forty-five alongside four other managers.
All her previous roles were easy to get. This one was hard. It took effort, intentionality, and grit. When she landed the job, Jenny wrote notes to herself as a kind of “playbook,” figuring she’d want to remember the details the next time she had to go through the process. The doc was also a tool Jenny could use as she mentored others. Soon people were sharing; hundreds and then thousands of employees at Google found “Jenny’s Job Search Tips” to be invaluable. Fast forward less than two years, and Jenny’s side project—which now includes workshops, keynotes, and tips on everything from email to influence to building a personal brand—is a full-blown global phenomenon called Own Your Career. A Google program with a $250,000 annual budget, Own Your Career is now used by 58,000 Googlers (that’s one-third of the company) and distributed by Google to companies like American Express, Spotify, Target, Indeed, and CVS.
Turns out lots of people want to know how to go from entry level at a place like Google to the top 2% of management, and in THE CHASE: An Unconventional, Uninhibited, and Unapologetic Approach to Getting What You Want in Life, Jenny Wood gives readers the playbook for that and more. Reclaiming labels we often attach to people who transgress social norms to get what they want—Weird, Selfish, Shameless, Nosy, Obsessed, to name a few—Jenny shows that “to get there, you have to be a little bit out there,” and her book transforms the labels into powerful mantras for success. Wood not only tells readers how to achieve better outcomes, she tells them exactly what to do, step-by-step, to overcome the most common personal and professional obstacles, from negotiating a raise to finding a mentor to landing a first date.
Before Google, Jenny Wood was a research associate at Harvard Business School, authoring case studies that have been published and sold to MBA programs worldwide. With her smarts, energy, and platform—and with Google’s full support in her tailwinds (she also flies airplanes)—Jenny Wood is poised to deliver the next must-buy book for the same ambitious readers who made Dare to Lead and Atomic Habits huge bestsellers.

A companion to the bestselling book
Imagine the perfect organizational system.
We can’t always recover from extreme stress, fatigue, or depression by changing our mindset alone. The mind is just one part of the body, connected to everything else by the most complex and powerful technology in the universe; the nervous system. And recent scientific studies have revealed that we have much more control over the mind through physical inputs than previously thought. Just as the brain influences the body, the body can influence the brain. Dr. Huberman wants to show us that we can harness the power of the nervous system to control our minds. We can use it to calm ourselves when feeling stressed, focus when feeling distracted, relax when it’s time to go to bed, and become energized when it’s time to get up.
When the unkind voice gets loud and I feel down, I can tell myself: