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OUT OF OFFICE

Name: OUT OF OFFICE
Author: Charlie Warzel
ISBN: 978-0-593-32009-9

THE BIG PROBLEM AND BIGGER PROMISE OF WORKING FROM HOME

by Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 7, 2021

A thought-provoking take on shaking up business as usual once the pandemic has passed.

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The ongoing pandemic has changed the culture of the office forever—for good, perhaps, and certainly for ill.

“Remote work…is not a cure for shitty management or a bad business model or a bad product. It is merely an organizing principle.” So write business journalists Warzel and Petersen, who investigate what has been happening to many organizing principles of corporate life in the last two years. Some of the changes have been decidedly negative. One example is that the CDC has urged commuters to travel in personal vehicles rather than on mass transit even though, as one scholar observes, there is no strong link between disease transmission and public transportation. In addition, with isolation and remote working, the boundaries between work and life, already fuzzy, became a blur. Corporations expect their workers to be available at all times, and workers deploy tactics such as replying to emails in the middle of the night, showing their devotion. Much of the authors’ argument, repeated a few times too often, centers on their insistence that it’s up to the workers to establish and maintain guidelines for keeping personal time safe and otherwise driving changes in corporate culture. Extending this, they urge reshaping business so that work is not the be-all and end-all of life, arguing that a healthy corporate culture would allow and encourage workers to devote time to community endeavors, self-care, education, and other matters not easily reduced to the bottom line. A flexible work life—with some days in the office and others at home—would improve cities by giving people access to parks and other amenities outside the weekend and by encouraging the formation of communities. Of course, write the authors, “organizations are naturally resistant to change,” and our current form of capitalism puts human considerations well behind financial ones, even if the pandemic showed us a different way to conduct our work lives.

A thought-provoking take on shaking up business as usual once the pandemic has passed.

Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-32009-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021

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THINK YOU'LL BE HAPPY

MOVING THROUGH GRIEF WITH GRIT, GRACE, AND GRATITUDE

by Nicole Avant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2023

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

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Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.

“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023

ISBN: 9780063304413

Page Count: 288

Publisher: HarperOne

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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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.