On-point leadership advice outshines some overly simplistic counsel.
A guide to becoming a braver and less fearful leader.
Success is not for the meek—per Warrell, the braver you are, the more successful you will be. The author breaks down her path to success into five steps, which comprise the five major sections of this book: “Focus on What You Want, Not on What You Fear,” “Research What’s Kept You Scared or Too Safe,” “Breathe in Courage,” “Step into Discomfort,” and “Find the Treasure When You Trip.” These practices are all fleshed out in detail in an effort to help readers to wipe away fear and fill that gap with courage. The first section sets up the rest of the book, hammering home the idea that readers should be focusing on what they want to achieve, not what scares them about that goal or their situation. “The fearful mind creates the gap,” Warrell writes. “The brave heart closes it.” The following chapters are devoted to ways to achieve this closure, including creating your “story,” or reality, in a way that will benefit you best; coming to embrace discomfort; and learning from your mistakes. The author sums it all up with a closing chapter on making those around you less fearful and more courageous, too. (“Measure yourself by how brave you make others feel,” she writes.) While the text contains some simplistic advice, such as admonitions to not cast yourself as the victim or become hemmed in by labels, Warrell, who has a background in business and psychology, also digs deeper at times, discussing how psychology and biology relate to her topics. There are some clever moments (the author describes human brains as “Teflon for good and Velcro for bad”), but some of Warrell’s advice comes off as a bit too elementary and disingenuous. For instance, her list of tips for telling your story includes using the word excited instead of scared and characterizing setbacks as learning experiences rather than failures. For the most part, though, this is a solid effort, filled with thoughtful guidance for overcoming the mundane.
On-point leadership advice outshines some overly simplistic counsel.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781523007240
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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