A dense but informative primer on navigating large-scale organizational transformations.
In this management treatise, economist Flanding and attorney Grabman argue that digital technology and shifting social norms are imposing changes that organizations must accommodate with clear goals.
The authors, both United Nations employees, offer that organization as a model of change oriented toward 17 guiding Sustainable Development Goals—from ending poverty and hunger to fostering clean energy. They recommend the seven steps of a change management framework developed by UN Lab for Organizational Change and Knowledge, which include crafting a change strategy, building capacity, and achieving quick wins; all of this is illustrated with case studies drawn from UN agencies. These include the UN Department of Safety and Security’s drive to achieve gender parity in its ranks, UN Cares’ initiative to foster LGBTQ+ inclusion using surveys that led to employee learning modules, efforts by several agencies to make administrative services more cost-effective by consolidating them in lower-cost cities, and a UN-wide move to recruit lower-level employees as change agents who advocate for climate measures or Covid-19 adaptations. From these examples, Flanding and Grabman distill principles for designing initiatives, highlighting the importance of sponsorship by powerful leaders, adapting past breakthroughs to new contexts, and communicating persuasively (noting, for instance, the value of videos that celebrate early successes). Overall, this is a book of granular management theory, steeped in academic prose and often focused on administrative minutiae: “[UNDSS] established an intra-departmental gender coordination team, a senior management gender steering group, and the inclusion of gender-related objectives in manager performance and development goals.” At their best, however, the authors write vividly of the human side of vast collective changes: “UN Cares’ reliance on [LGBTQ+] experts who had been discriminated against…gave voice to the previously voiceless and allowed them to tell their own stories….People and their stories are memorable, much more so than dry hypotheticals unmoored from real experience.” Managers in the midst of organizational upheavals will find plenty of intriguing food for thought here.
A dense but informative primer on navigating large-scale organizational transformations.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781803821443
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
