A lean, sharp, and readable leadership enhancement program.
A well-organized business book designed to help managers become leaders.
In his latest book, Timms draws on his own long experience of counseling businesses to distill the fundamentals of good leadership and differentiate them from various types of poor management. At the heart of his treatment is what he calls a “superpower”: systems thinking, which management theorist Peter Senge defined in the 1990s as “seeing patterns where others see only events and forces to react to,” and which the author describes as “simply a more enlightened way of looking at problems to discover insights that would otherwise remain undetected.” Developing the superpower of systems thinking will, he contends, allows one to take a wider view, and step back and see unhelpful processes; taking ownership of such behaviors and working to improve them increases personal accountability, he asserts. Timms returns often to this latter concept, discussing how to hold others accountable in an organization, and how to create organizations that are accountable to the wider community. It’s clear from his fast-paced chapters that he views this idea as the crucial difference between being simply a manager and being a leader. Managers might be problem-solvers, but, as Timms puts it, “you are only a leader when others willingly follow you because they trust and respect you, not because they fear the consequences of not doing so.” The author also distills three main habits that readers can develop in order to build this trust and respect: First, don’t rely on blaming others; second, acknowledge one’s own part in any problem; and third, fix processes to get the desired result. In clear, confident prose, Timms outlines a leadership blueprint that has many basic elements in common with other books in the genre, but he presents them energetically, along with useful charts and illustrations. Overall, the author asks readers to ask themselves a daunting but simple question: “Would anybody willingly follow me if they weren’t being paid to do so?” His strategies will help readers find answers.
A lean, sharp, and readable leadership enhancement program.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-03-910229-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
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
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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