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
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
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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