A straight-talking and all-encompassing guide to assuming control of work in progress.
Fenelon presents tested strategies for taking over work projects midstream.
In his nonfiction debut, the author takes an in-depth look at an aspect of the business and professional world that seldom gets comprehensive treatment despite being, as Fenelon supports with data, nearly ubiquitous: the experience of taking over a project you didn’t start. Project managers deal with this situation all the time, and in these pages the author draws on his decades of experience (more than 40 years of project management across multiple industries, with both local and global teams) to lay out some principles that may help the process go more smoothly. PMs are frequently given control of some long-standing project with a deadline and a budget they didn’t set, often staffed by people they don’t know and might not have chosen. Typically, the project is failing in some way (running over costs, falling behind delivery date), hence the need for a new PM. Fenelon lays out the basics: take a bird’s-eye view of the entire project, zero in on a handful of immediate problems that need addressing (his book isn’t exclusively about ailing projects, but the emphasis is clear), and, most importantly, come up with a new plan for completing the project, since the original plan almost certainly isn’t working. In clear prose that’s mercifully light on corporate jargon (and often usefully illustrated by instructive inset sections), Fenelon goes over the key priorities of a new PM: “rapidly assess the current status, identify any issues, and prioritize them for correction while keeping the project running” (this last in reference to Fenelon’s comparison of a new PM’s job to a mechanic changing the tires on a moving automobile). Neophyte managers will find his clarifications invaluable.
A straight-talking and all-encompassing guide to assuming control of work in progress.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9798887594194
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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