Amusing tales and tidbits surprisingly pertinent to business professionals.
A professor offers a novel approach that encourages emulating comedians as a way to make career and business improvements.
McGraw, a marketing/psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, knows a thing or two about comedy. He founded the Humor Research Lab and co-authored The Humor Code (2014). In this unusually engaging read, he turns his attention to the behind-the-scenes world of stand-up, improv, and sketch comedy. That would be intriguing enough, but McGraw takes it further, showing how comedians think and act and relating it to business in an effort to “revolutionize your work life—and beyond.” From the outset, the author makes it clear his goal is not to teach readers to be funny but rather to “think funny.” The book’s chapters address what comedians do that could be applied to a business setting. For example, “Step Out of the Stream” demonstrates how comics often take risks and break rules. McGraw illustrates his thesis beautifully with anecdotes about comedians and excerpts from their acts, followed by several examples of businesses that succeeded by taking risks and breaking rules. “Cooperate to Innovate” serves to explode the myth of the solo comedian; here, the author relates the story of Merrill Markoe. She crafted jokes and bits for David Letterman, whose television show won Emmys for outstanding writing. “Pretty good on their own, they became fantastic when they teamed up,” writes McGraw. The author delves deeply into cooperation as part of sketch and improv comedy, citing additional hands-on examples. One of the more intriguing concepts he introduces is “complementation…the magic made when opposites come together, creating a sum that is greater than its parts.” McGraw again illustrates this idea with brief case studies. In addition to excellent examples from both comedy and business, the volume features two unique sidebars: “Shtick From Shane,” interspersed humorous short takes from stand-up comedian Shane Mauss, and “Act Out,” insightful observations from the author that perfectly highlight the comedy-business connection. Throughout the book, McGraw employs an animated yet authoritative writing style enhanced by a rich sense of humor.
Amusing tales and tidbits surprisingly pertinent to business professionals.Pub Date: March 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0807-8
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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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