The Human Side of the International Assignment
The psychology of relocation, written for the people who run mobility programs. Available now for Kindle, with the paperback following shortly.
Where the strategy books give the human side a chapter, this is the whole book.
Relocation gets managed as a logistics problem because logistics is the part that reports itself.
Visas clear. Shipments arrive. Schools enroll. Every one of those can be marked complete on a date, and so every one of them gets planned, budgeted, and tracked. The psychological adjustment that determines whether an assignment actually holds has no completion date at all. It rarely gets planned for, and it almost never gets measured.
This book is about that gap. Drawing on nearly two decades of clinical practice alongside the research literature, it sets out what happens to a person after they land: the real shape of the adjustment arc, why the hardest stretch tends to arrive long after the welcome period has ended, what happens to an accompanying partner who has no built-in structure to step into, and why coming home is so often the loss nobody thought to prepare for.
It is not a memoir and it is not a manual. It is the reasoning that sits underneath a mobility program that works.
The book is the thinking. The toolkits are the infrastructure.
Anchor Point’s toolkits are the operational answer to the problem the book describes: readiness assessments, manager guidance, self-guided psychoeducation for the employee and the accompanying partner, and a repatriation track, all built for an HR or Global Mobility team to run internally without a clinician on staff.
The book sets out the reasoning underneath them in full, including the research it rests on and the places where the industry’s received figures do not survive scrutiny. Read either one first. They answer the same question from opposite ends.
Explore the toolkits →The move is managed. The person is not.
Available now for Kindle. The paperback edition follows shortly.
Read it on Kindle