An engaging and valuable manual for contemporary leaders.
A guide focuses on cultivating leadership skills.
According to Yeo, agility is vital to workplace success. Without a deep understanding of this quality, leaders will find the path to victory unclear. The author offers a manual on agile leadership that empowers readers with research, real-world examples, and pointed questions, enabling them to create managerial maps that reflect their personal goals and values. To help leaders understand the shifting landscape of the modern workforce, Yeo draws on astute research regarding staff satisfaction and workplace perceptions, including generational outlooks, employees’ desires for increased flexibility, the prioritization of wellness, and the fostering of trust in leaders. The author also debunks business myths that can sabotage the success of growing companies, such as the beliefs that staffers can be easily replaced and that salary alone drives employee happiness. But the wisdom of great leaders doesn’t arise from research alone. Instead, it is cultivated through active listening, broad collaboration, and self-awareness (“If you don’t know what you are made of, then the best version of you cannot be born”). Yeo encourages managers to heed the “Five Inner Voices of Agile Leadership”—“The Captain,” “The Developer,” “The Strategist,” “The Visionary,” and “The Agilist”—each one enhancing the culture and relationships that forge workplace success. To add further depth to these principles, the author cites examples of effective leaders she’s worked with, each of whom initially struggled with confidence, openness to feedback, and other managerial behaviors. A motivational theme in these engrossing stories is the belief that through humility, a commitment to understand and embrace agility, and the wise use of patience, leaders at all levels can achieve their full potentials while building the happy and inclusive cultures that result in thriving workplaces. Overall, this manual makes learning about leadership fun. Characterized by an inviting and accessible writing style, the worthwhile book delivers a flexibility that the audience will appreciate. The guide can be perused sequentially or thematically, with readers prioritizing the topics of greatest relevance to them. Through self-examination exercises and supplemental materials, this highly personalized framework will help readers navigate an evolving workplace, building self-awareness and adaptable leadership styles that their teams will love.
An engaging and valuable manual for contemporary leaders.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9789815127973
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Penguin Random House SEA
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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