A powerful call for putting corporate culture first in every aspect of business.
A new view of management and team leadership.
Pokorny, the founder and CEO of Mammoth Leadership Sciences, here propounds his belief that corporate culture is of paramount importance in business. The title of his book derives from his thought-experiment of picturing primitive humans planning to attack a mammoth; in these pages, he wryly imagines a modern business faced with the same challenge: “There would be time, budget, and ROI analyses across multiple departments,” he writes. “Let’s be honest, your team would likely starve before getting close to a single woolly mammoth!” This prompts him to reflect on corporate culture, noting that though this concept is often discussed, it’s seldom enacted: “We spend days, weeks, even months preparing next year’s strategic goals but devote hardly any time to building a strong culture to support our strategic goals.” He structures his suggested remedies under three general headings: people, strategy, and implementation. And he always has a clear eye for the fallibility of humans, imperfect creatures who “like shortcuts, can get greedy … try to dominate others,” and so on. To counteract these shortcomings, he proposes broad protocols under a “Dynamic Stability Framework,” frequently returning to the old idea of not making perfect the enemy of good. “100 percent quick, 70 percent right, and the rest can be fixed later!” he reminds his readers, noting that they’ll never have all of the information they need to make perfect decisions or put them into practice. Pokorny presents these maxims with force and a friendly clarity drawn from decades working in a variety of leadership roles; most of his points resound because they’re obviously distilled from personal experience. His repeated insistence on the importance of baking a unified corporate culture into the DNA of hiring, training, and mentoring might trouble readers who don’t want to live, eat, and breathe their jobs—but they’re clearly not the book’s target audience.
A powerful call for putting corporate culture first in every aspect of business.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781647048433
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2024
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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