In a wide-ranging study, Guillén provides a wealth of insights about how we can get the best from social change.
An acclaimed thought leader proposes a new way of looking at shifting demographic patterns.
Guillén is a professor of management at the Wharton School, and his book 2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything demonstrated his ability to tackle big-picture issues. Here, the author expands on themes he has touched on previously, looking at the interaction of increased longevity and accelerating technological trends. He argues that the idea of a linear life of compartmentalized stages is no longer appropriate and that concepts like retirement are now doing more harm than good. He proposes an alternative: a postgenerational workforce of “perennials,” where older people are encouraged to work well into their 70s alongside their younger colleagues. The author rejects the idea that older people are too set in their ways to adapt, and he points to evidence showing that, when given the opportunity, they can use their experience and maturity to add value to any business wise enough to hold on to them. At the same time, older people who remain in the workforce offer huge marketing opportunities for companies looking to expand their product lines in everything from cosmetics to cars. Educational institutions should also be willing to embrace older students, since there is necessity for continual reskilling to accommodate new technologies and trends. The author acknowledges that all this will require a new mindset. Younger people must be willing to accept older people in the workplace even while they themselves grapple with the idea of lifelong learning. Equally, older people need to accept that change, both technological and social, will be a constant in their lives. This is not easy, but the upside is that many more people have the opportunity to lead lives that are personally rewarding and socially fulfilling.
In a wide-ranging study, Guillén provides a wealth of insights about how we can get the best from social change.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9781250281340
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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