An effective weekly dose of leadership coaching for go-getters.
Rogers provides professionals with a year’s worth of inspiring messages as part of his “mission to build an army of Disciplined Leaders.”
In these pages, anecdotes from the author’s life, career, and participation in sports exemplify his teachings, which extol the virtues of integrity, timeliness, humility, discipline, a positive attitude, and continual improvement (Rogers focuses on Thursdays because he emailed his first motivational message to coaching clients on that day in 2019). The author cites his father and his high school football coach as his greatest mentors, but he also highlights other people as examples of excellence, like his popular barber—Rogers notes his barber’s success isn’t due to his haircutting savvy but to his personality. The author also praises various businesses, like the Markel Group, a company that emphasizes honesty, fairness, and even humor in their work style. Among Rogers’ original concepts is “Treadmill Accountability,” which takes the idea that treadmills don’t lie and uses it as a metaphor for brutal honesty with oneself in the personal and professional spheres. The aphorism “God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason” inspires the author’s command to “Respect the Ratio,” meaning leaders should listen more than they talk. Rogers cautions against “The Waiting Place,” a state characterized by hesitation and procrastination in which progress dies. He concludes with a reminder that there’s “no finish line” to self-improvement. (As an extra motivational push, Rogers signs off each message with “Average sits on the bench.”) The book’s short chapters and weekly reading structure will make it easy for leaders to stay inspired. Rogers also infuses his advice with humor: One of his team’s “three simple rules” is “Do not be f****** late.” The author unabashedly encourages black-and-white thinking, and some observations (“We all know the professionals execute the boring while the amateurs lie to themselves”) lack nuance. The sports metaphors may seem excessive and unrelatable to those uninterested in professional athletics.
An effective weekly dose of leadership coaching for go-getters.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9798891383791
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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