A frank and clearheaded soup-to-nuts plan for better consulting.
An experienced consultant shares the fruits of his experience in this guide.
“The consulting life is a constant challenge,” Baker asserts in his book’s introduction. “You’re standing naked in front of people who’ve tried their best to figure it out but are stuck.” While readers will hope that naked is figurative, the author elaborates: “You are with them, but you are pushing them upstream into uncomfortable places.” In his many books, Baker has sought to zero in on the best advice he can give his readers to help them avoid some of the mistakes he has made. Here, he writes to his target audience of consultants and consultant wannabes, characterizing the types of individuals who’ll get the most out of his latest volume—they’ll have a quality about them “that makes people want to listen”; they’ll love money not for what it can buy but for the freedom it represents; and they’re terrified of irrelevance and thus always trying to reinvent themselves. Having been sufficiently flattered (are there any readers perusing this guide who won’t think all the traits Baker lists apply to them?), the audience is then acquainted with the four pillars of the author’s methodology: insight, objectivity, courage, and empathy. These and other concepts in the manual are so obvious as to be almost banal. Baker compensates for this not only with striking charts and Mills’ eye-catching illustrations, but also with a conversational, highly readable prose style that always feels blunt yet sympathetic. “Whether you warm to my suggested stages or not, I want you to recognize that you should change your practices over time,” he writes at one point about not getting frozen in old patterns. “If you don’t do that, you won’t step into the role that is waiting for you to claim.” He’s confident enough in the counsel he’s passing along to refrain from overselling it, and that’s quite refreshing.
A frank and clearheaded soup-to-nuts plan for better consulting.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-60544-088-0
Page Count: 185
Publisher: RockBench Publishing Corp.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2022
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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