A valuable handbook for leaders and decision-makers at any level of the organizational chart.
Leadership lessons from the front lines, just where leadership is most needed.
As the title suggests, Willink (The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership To Lead and Win, 2018, etc.), a retired Navy SEAL, views the world from a military point of view. That said, the lessons he offers here are of universal application, for, as he notes, “what makes leadership so hard is dealing with people, and people are crazy.” Fair enough. The practice of leadership is therefore a fluid thing that has to be tailored to the people at hand, and that requires the ability to observe and listen quietly, sometimes when your head is about to explode. The author has a lesson for that, too, and it’s a highly useful one: Lift your chin, “which elevates your vision and compels you to look around,” breathe deeply, and try to give your brain a chance to catch up to your emotions. Throughout, Willink is tough-minded—one of his lessons suggests that the leader not be too quick to praise or too effusive with it since the natural tendency of folks being praised is to slack off—but he’s also fair-minded: A lesson that will be hard for micromanagers to assimilate is to back off and give people a chance to figure out how to do things for themselves, the paradox being that the person who leads the most actually leads the least. The sitting president might take a lesson or two from the author’s eminently useful manual, especially when it comes to throwing other people under the bus in order to save your own skin. “When people notice that,” Willink writes, “they will not follow you for long.” There’s plenty of psychology at play here but, thankfully, not much in the way of Machiavellian machinations: When things aren’t working the way they’re supposed to, Willink counsels, the first direction to look is inward, not at others to point the blame.
A valuable handbook for leaders and decision-makers at any level of the organizational chart.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-22684-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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