An earnest business book that offers a readable but ultimately uneven blend of fiction and nonfiction.
Gottlieb presents a story-focused guide to improving managerial attitudes.
The author begins his debut volume with a “parable”—a fictional segment that tells the story of a man named George Warren. He’s a single dad, raising his daughter, Amelia, and struggling with the many challenges of running Warren Construction, the company he owns. “Ever since I became owner…my life has felt like one of those horror movies where you invite the friendly vampire into your house, and before you know it, you’re one of the undead,” George reflects. He has clients and projects, but his work is often hampered by his inability to get all his workers on the same page. He’s feeling hopeless when he meets successful businessman Marty Gold, owner of True North Improvements, who gives him a tour of his own company, whose employees have gratitude and enthusiasm. Marty then introduces George to the five pillars of management: that one’s belief is transferable, that managers need checklists, and that effective leaders shape their business’s culture with purpose and direction, are aware of their own voice’s “echo,” and use their business as a training organization. Marty’s mentoring turns George’s business around, and in the book’s second half, Gottlieb shifts from storytelling to exposition to elaborate on the five pillars, using charts, graphs and other illustrations to provide “actionable insights that will help you create a more aligned team.” A number of leadership books use fictional vignettes to highlight their lessons, but they aren’t as well done as Gottlieb’s, which is genuinely engaging and reads like a good novel. The second half, however, is less effective, in part because it offers a view of work as a life-consuming experience that many leaders, and many prospective employees, may not share, as when he asserts that stress can be erased by not believing in it: “Stress won’t kill you unless you believe it will. That is because belief is one of the most powerful energies in the universe. A positive belief about yourself will inspire a limitless mindset.”
An earnest business book that offers a readable but ultimately uneven blend of fiction and nonfiction.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798887504315
Page Count: 216
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
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