A book of useful information for a changing employment landscape.
A businessman details the pluses and minuses of outsourcing.
Readers likely won’t be surprised at what Gallimore, a British entrepreneur and the creator of outsourcing marketplace Outsource Accelerator, has to say in this debut book, considering how many people’s work habits have shifted during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. However, they will be engaged by his treatise as a proponent of outsourcing—hiring talented, less-expensive workers globally and having them work remotely, rather than bringing an employee into the office—and says that it’s a strategy that’s growing more common. He notes that “we all increasingly shop for clothes, buy food, build friendships, find dates, book taxis, reminisce with old friends, and binge-watch our favorite shows” online, and that “it will soon be the place we all go to hire our employees.” His book offers a fine primer for many types of small-business owners, defining what outsourcing is and whether it’s the right move for a particular company. He covers a great deal of subject matter on the subject, including how to develop a framework for outsourced workers, how to hire the right people from afar and give them appropriate job training, and how to build and manage an offshore workforce, specifically drawing on his considerable experience in the Philippines, where he’s lived since 2014. The book benefits greatly from Gallimore’s to-the-point writing style, presenting information that, in other hands, might have felt convoluted. For example, he cogently notes that offshoring relieves an employer of “most of the administrative work of compliance, payroll, HR, and the general complexities of employment. This allows you, the client, to focus more on operations, growth, and scaling your business.” The book is filled with useful tips, and Gallimore makes great use of lists and bullet points to make the information digestible, including “12 characteristics of a great client and successful student of outsourcing,” which many will find indispensable. If outsourcing will soon be the way of the world, as Gallimore predicts, this book may help many get through it successfully.
A book of useful information for a changing employment landscape.Pub Date: May 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73962-300-5
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Outsource Accelerator
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2022
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
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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