A persuasive case for bringing soldiering lessons into the boardroom.
Berry, a U.S. Army veteran, applies his military training to running a business in this guide.
The author, CEO of a law firm, advises readers on how to apply concepts and principles from military life to civilian business in this book, which shares its title with Berry’s podcast. It’s divided into three sections: “Survive,” “Thrive,” and “Dominate.” Each themed section combines military practices, including the buddy system, moving in cadence, adhering to strict standards, and making good use of downtime, with common business scenarios to create practical and actionable applications. Some concepts—such as that leaders should spend one-third of the allotted time planning, so that their subordinates can spend the other two-thirds executing—are easy to apply directly; others head into metaphorical terrain, as when he uses procedures for handling a malfunctioning machine gun to make a point about maintaining momentum. Berry, who served in the U.S. military in Bosnia and Iraq, is particularly insightful in explaining how aspects of a sergeant’s role can be applied to the corporate world—a topic that reappears in many contexts throughout the book. This guide is aimed primarily at other military veterans; Berry occasionally asks readers to remember elements of their military training or barracks life. However, it will also be accessible to those who have no firsthand knowledge of boot camp or discharge paperwork. Readers who are skeptical of the educational value of doing pushups to the point of collapse may not share the author’s positivity regarding the rigors of boot camp, but they may also find his application of the Army’s assessment process to corporate performance reviews to be very worthwhile. Berry is a persuasive writer, combining an obvious enthusiasm for his thesis with well-reasoned, highly readable arguments, illustrated with numerous anecdotes. The book covers some material that regular readers of business books will find familiar, but it does so with fresh insights that make it a useful addition to the genre.
A persuasive case for bringing soldiering lessons into the boardroom.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2024
ISBN: 9798990533509
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Sabrequill Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 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
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