Carefully researched, tightly written, and timely leadership advice.
A compact treatise advances the notion of servant leadership.
Harris, a former pharmaceutical executive and the author of Leader Board (2019), believes it’s time for “a new revolution” that revolves around something he calls “servant leadership.” Drawing on the writings of numerous leadership experts, including Jim Collins, Stephen R. Covey, and Patrick Lencioni, Harris weaves together their thinking with his own beliefs to make a case for servant leaders—those who listen intently, promote teamwork, and generously share credit for success. The book moves from defining servant leadership and identifying its principles to implementing the concept. This involves building personal leadership effectiveness, learning how to use influence and “positive psychology,” developing a strong team, defining the right mission, and becoming a model leader. Each of the first seven chapters is brief but packed with insightful advice and examples. Chapter 8 reviews the key points covered and relates them to other sources. This is as much a motivational work as it is instructional. Harris frequently encourages readers to embrace servant leadership as the best way forward: “You will gain more energy, enthusiasm, positivity, proactivity, intensity, and resilience to take on greater challenges and reap the rewards of doing so.” Given the plethora of books on leadership, it is no easy task to break the mold, and many of the maxims in this volume will no doubt be recognizable to readers. Still, the author’s enthusiasm for the subject is infectious, and some of his observations are noteworthy, such as “Exceptional leaders…know where they are going, and what it will take to get there.” In addition to strongly promoting the development of effective teams, Harris correctly suggests that leaders and their companies should be laser-focused on serving customers: “Creating customer value is the key to sustainable, long-term performance.…Remember: the people who serve the customer are precious.” In an age where some may view leadership as increasingly autocratic, if not dictatorial, the humanistic view expressed by the author is reassuring.
Carefully researched, tightly written, and timely leadership advice.Pub Date: April 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73488-150-9
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Intent Books
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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