A sturdy, well-informed treatise about trading change for care in the workplace.
A senior executive reflects on the importance of stability in the workplace.
Goodall, a former executive at Cisco and Deloitte and co-author of Nine Lies About Work, is sick of the workplace upheaval he calls “life in the blender.” As he notes, “life inside many companies today feels like an endless procession of upheavals, each unleashing another torrent of change and rearrangement and reconstruction, each once again reshuffling all the pieces into some supposedly more desirable configuration.” Rather than improving company culture, this constant flux makes companies less humane—and therefore more difficult—places to work. “Work today uproots us, in many cases needlessly, and in many more cases carelessly,” writes the author. “We are suffering from the human version of transplant shock.” Drawing on two decades of personal experience and a plethora of research, he argues for a series of practices companies can use to support stability. These include implementing and valuing rituals like weekly check-ins, seeking out opportunities to make space for spontaneous input, encouraging bonding through work in small groups, creating an organizational identity through shared secrets, and fostering personal autonomy as a way of building resilience. Throughout, Goodall insists on prioritizing predictability and human connection over buzzwords like “innovation.” Indeed, he devotes an entire chapter to the importance of eschewing corporate jargon for verbal clarity. Goodall’s insistence on humanity is a refreshing alternative to the current trend of treating corporations—rather than workers—as people, and his emphasis on collaboration over competition is a significant departure from mainstream business-speak. However, techniques such as “space-making” have been practices in activist communities for years, which the author does not acknowledge. Overall, though, the book’s clear language, deep research, and clarity of concepts make it a useful read for managers and employees alike.
A sturdy, well-informed treatise about trading change for care in the workplace.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780316560276
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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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