An upbeat and proactive plan to address and resolve issues surrounding diversity at the corporate level.
A comprehensive guidebook to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the workplace.
Debut author, organizational psychologist, and executive coach Cox begins her overview of DEI with stories of executives who’ve come to her over the years, worried that their own efforts in these areas have met with less success than they hoped. To these executives, and implicitly to her broader readership, she points out that the most accurate way to gauge DEI progress is through the reactions of “the stakeholders who matter the most”: the employees. “If employees can’t see and feel meaningful DE&I outcomes,” she writes, “they will not believe their leaders are building an inclusive organization.” Cox breaks down the historical underpinnings and current variations on respect, equity, diversity, and inclusion (REDI, her preferred term for DEI) as they apply to “targeted groups” affected by diversity and inclusion issues, including women and people of color. Cox proposes a five-step approach to REDI, involving understanding one’s own beliefs about its central concepts, connecting with people whose experiences one doesn’t have, and facing REDI anxieties—a “combination of avoidance and social awkwardness” that Cox describes as “the hallmark of many workplace interactions between leaders and employees of color.” She also highlights the importance of modeling “the REDI way like the organization’s primary change agent (which is what you are)!” Using a combination of data, statistics, and personal stories from her own life and those of people she’s interviewed in the business world—including her own anonymized clients—the author lays out various forms of workplace bias and a number of ways to identify and resolve them.
Over the course of this book, Cox wisely decides to ground her narrative in both anecdote and analysis, and, as such, her accounts of her own experiences as a Black female professional are blended well with those of other interviewees. In particular, her discussions of “unconscious bias” in businesses may enlighten any readers who might believe company DEI officers are unnecessary. She also strongly asserts that investors should pressure corporate boards to improve their diversity: “You must create and maintain an environment in which traditionally underrepresented groups do not face systemic hindrances and are unequivocally safe to voice the injustices they experience.” Over the course of this book, Cox adopts a tone that’s firm but patient and persistently encouraging as she asserts that vigilant REDI measures benefit each and every employee, as when she writes that “Systemic bias affects all people in the system (in the organization) and its effects, though persistent, may not be readily observed or redressed.” Throughout the work, her explanations of bias—its various origins, its expressions, and its possible resolutions—are carefully pitched to reach the widest variety of readers. The personal elements of her points will likely make them relatable and thought-provoking to a wide range of readers, particularly those in her clear target audience: corporate executives and diversity officers.
An upbeat and proactive plan to address and resolve issues surrounding diversity at the corporate level.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77458-179-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 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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