Eye-opening, insightful, and filled with practical advice about office jerks.
An organizational consultant highlights unsavory characters found in the workplace.
Carnachan’s well-organized, exhaustive study of “Jerketypes” is simultaneously unsettling and reassuring. The fact that she can identify so many jerks in the workplace may be disturbing, but her reasoned counsel for how to cope with them should have a calming effect on most readers. The author applies her decades of experience as both an employee and a coach/consultant to identify nine broad types of jerks, breaking them down into subsets. Some of them, such as “The Narcissistic Jerk,” seem more dangerous than others, like “The Jokester Jerk,” but all of them are worthy of exploration. In each chapter, Carnachan identifies the characteristics of one type of jerk and offers detailed suggestions for dealing with the culprit. The author covers interactions with difficult or exasperating individuals who may be bosses, co-workers, or subordinates. Carnachan includes richly described anecdotes that appropriately illustrate the behavior of each Jerketype. Several of these vignettes are drawn from the author’s coaching experience. For example, in discussing the “Gang Leader,” one form of Narcissistic Jerk, the author relates the story of Samantha, a skilled worker who “was an absolute misery for her manager, Ashley, because of her sarcastic and critical comments about management.” Carnachan explains how she worked with Ashley to create a “performance improvement plan” for Samantha, who, it turns out, eventually resigned. “Lesson learned,” writes the author. “Ashley appointed a new lead from her existing staff who had excellent interpersonal skills and good technical skills.” These illustrative tales enrich the book and make for engaging reading. There is also an opportunity for self-reflection using worksheets included by Carnachan and designed to identify if readers might be Jerketypes. A chapter called “When the Jerk Is a Toxic Work Culture” discusses workplaces more broadly, defining several typical dysfunctional cultures and potential actions to take. A closing chapter reinforces a key overarching theme: “Remember that the only person you can change is you and what you say and do really does affect others.”
Eye-opening, insightful, and filled with practical advice about office jerks.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-369-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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
IN THE NEWS
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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