Cohesive and impassioned; a bold, engaging path to effective leadership.
This debut manual/workbook focuses on self-directed leadership enrichment.
Some business leadership processes concentrate on organizational dependencies that could possibly impede personal development. Hardy’s methodology is decidedly different. She puts the responsibility for leadership squarely on an individual’s shoulders, suggesting that one must undergo a transformation by “engineering disruption in your life to become a better leader.” The approach is aptly named “crossing meridians” by the author, whose own development as a leader is emblematic. She rose from family poverty in the Mississippi city of Meridian to earn a law degree, hold senior positions at major insurance companies, and eventually form her own global consulting firm. This excellent work shows novice and experienced leaders alike how to chart a course through a deftly organized process of discovery, planning, and acting—with the ultimate goal of sustaining personal leadership excellence. The metaphorical use of meridians to represent both personal and organizational lines that must be crossed is very appropriate. It also serves to anchor the book around a strong, memorable concept that cleverly links the text to Hardy’s hometown of Meridian, a “symbolic origination point.” “Beginning Meridian” signifies a familiar, comfortable place from which any leadership journey starts. While it is easy to get too caught up in the volume’s “meridian” terminology, the approach is both logical and practical. During the author’s superb explanation of her self-improvement system, she recounts pertinent examples from her own life and cites several client illustrations to make the process come alive. A section on racial justice/workplace diversity is particularly timely and enlightening. Hardy stresses the importance of “empathy, openness, and resiliency” as “the bedrock—the ballast—of leadership.” She also highlights “leadership fluency” (the ability to “fluidly and continually navigate across divides” within organizations) as well as the need to build a distinct, personal “leadership brand.” Such concepts raise the content to a strategic level while the workbook integrated into the volume allows individuals to dive into the details and execute their own unique leadership development plans.
Cohesive and impassioned; a bold, engaging path to effective leadership.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66551-261-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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