An invitingly readable and inspirational story about managerial change.
An instructive allegory about building better managerial skills.
Jessica, the fictional hero in this debut book by leadership coach Anastasopolous and author LaMarre, is a team leader in a bustling sales business, and even though she and her team are operating in “the blissful ignorance that comes from a growing market,” lately they feel like they’re making no progress, despite their hard work. The company’s leaders seem mired in outdated, ineffective strategies, and Jessica feels mired in her own malaise: She has a loving husband, a wonderful daughter, and a high-paying position, but she’s lost her passion for her job, which seems to be overwhelming her. Then she receives help from an unexpected source: a mysterious voice, apparently coming from a woman in an Edward Hopper painting, who offers disarmingly simple advice for how to turn things around. This counsel begins with something far simpler and more direct than anything Jessica has heard in the business world before: “If you expect your people to leave their humanity aside as soon as they enter the office, it’s going to tear them in two,” the voice tells her. “We’re all kids on a playground wanting to be loved, celebrated, and acknowledged.” Jessica begins to implement this new humanistic approach, with immediate positive results. As the story goes on to follow Jessica’s adventures with her new worldview, the authors very effectively personalize what might otherwise have been rather rote business motivational tips about being more empathetic toward one’s employees. It transforms Jessica into a fine example for any struggling middle-manager who might be looking to improve the way they approach their job. Along the way, it even presents readers with a few basic tenets of Stoicism: “We cannot control the way others react to the things we do and say,” Jessica is told. “We can only control the way we react to their reactions.”
An invitingly readable and inspirational story about managerial change.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-910976-6
Page Count: 186
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 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
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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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