A valuable manual deftly shows that certain success skills can’t be learned in the classroom.
A multifaceted guide focuses on career considerations.
With experience developing learning tools at MIT and Harvard Business School, Herschberg uses this debut to impart his knowledge of the working world, highlighting critical “firm skills” he believes are rarely taught in educational institutions. The book, which the author likens to a “career success accelerator,” encompasses three areas: “Career,” “Leadership & Management,” and “Interpersonal Dynamics.” The “Career” section covers how to develop a career plan, how to work effectively in a company setting, and interviewing skills, both from the candidate’s and company’s perspectives. The first chapter is the most expansive in the volume; it offers a useful road map for a career plan with key questions to answer, a discussion of various options, and suggestions for developing the blueprint. The three examples Herschberg offers for a “Career Decision Tree” helpfully depict the kinds of preparation and experience needed to progress in certain fields. This chapter also addresses the value of collaborating with a mentor and the differences between working for a startup and a large corporation. “Working Effectively” is an insightful overview of the role of the individual in an organization; it includes valuable guidance for navigating departments, reading signals from company management, and comprehending corporate politics. “Interviewing” serves a dual purpose: This chapter gives the job candidate solid advice on how to interview for a position as well as actionable criteria for a team tasked with hiring a candidate. Here, the author provides a plethora of interview questions divided into such categories as “Values,” “Situational Questions,” and “Analysis.”
The book’s second part examines leadership and management skills, which are extensively covered in other guides. Still, Herschberg manages to deliver some new, engaging material. For example, he draws a perceptive distinction between “positional” and “influential” leadership, presents the intriguing “myth of the alpha male,” and sensitively calls attention to the “double bind” of the female leader: “The more a woman exhibits the traits often associated with being a good leader, such as being direct, confident, unemotional, and ambitious, the more she violates the societal expectations we have of a ‘good woman,’ meaning gentle, self-deprecating, emotional, and supportive.” The portion on being an effective manager is equally illuminating. The author emphasizes the manager’s four roles (“Strategist,” “Translator,” “Planner,” “Coach”), shares several intriguing theories about employee motivation, and provides a solid discussion of teamwork. The final part of the guide is perhaps the most meaningful; it addresses interacting with others, concentrating on communication, networking, negotiation, and ethics. In this section, Herschberg furnishes numerous beneficial and insightful tips. Concerning networking, for example, he supplies specific, useful examples of the wrong and right ways to network. The chapter on negotiation may be one of the most pertinent in the volume. Herschberg identifies stages and types of negotiations, again using excellent, relevant illustrations, and suggests how to deal with a job offer. A closing chapter on business and personal ethics is laudable.
A valuable manual deftly shows that certain success skills can’t be learned in the classroom.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-96-010074-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Cognosco Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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
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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