A smart, funny, and useful overview of how to behave at work.
An offbeat guide to dealing with other people—at work and in life.
In irreverent tones reminiscent of Irma Bombeck and Dave Barry, Newland writes about the spoken and unspoken etiquettes of the workplace, usually but not exclusively aimed at readers who are just entering that world. She advises such readers to become friendly with the boss’s secretary, for instance (“Don’t delude yourself into thinking you are more important than this executive assistant no matter what your title is,” she writes) and to avoid using company equipment for personal use, which includes “watching sitcoms on the business computer, trolling, or playing electronic poker”). She stresses developing a friendly but comprehensive professionalism on subjects from prepping for an interview to assessing the company’s pecking order. All of this advice is conveyed with a gentle, wry tone: “You do not come to work with your underwear worn on the outside of your clothes, your drawers on your head, or have certain anatomy on display,” she writes about how to dress at work, “I don’t care what Madonna does.” The booklet’s short chapters use bulleted points and cartoons to make an already light book feel even lighter, but Newland is often serious and refreshingly candid under the humorous surface. She advises her readers, for instance, to take the exit interview process seriously: “This is not the time for whining, remember, you are heading out the door.” Likewise, she warns readers to be cautious at holiday office parties since “the office snitches also will be there, ready with their phone cameras.” Newland can be winningly self-deprecating. She confesses, “I can’t tell you where my muse is from, primarily because she rolls her eyes and tells me to ‘shut the hell up’ whenever I ask,” and this blend of goofy humor and real-world savvy is very effective.
A smart, funny, and useful overview of how to behave at work.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9798887313641
Page Count: 50
Publisher: Fulton Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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