Useful to those whose job it is to plan meetings, conferences, and the like and a worthy survival manual for consumers of...
Wherever two or more of you gather, you’re probably doing it wrong.
The reason that most of us hate meetings is that meetings are so hateful: They’re too often aimless and endless, poorly conducted and seldom meaningfully concluded. Parker—founder of a company that specializes in “transformative gatherings” and a sort of Martha Stewart of the conference table—identifies the common errors that go into gathering, which she helpfully, if perhaps obviously, glosses as “the conscious bringing together of people for a reason.” The “for a reason” bit is key, for the act of bringing people together can seem like an afterthought, seldom planned through from beginning to end and a font of missed opportunities. The first step, writes the author, is “committing to a bold, sharp purpose,” with milestones along the way that include plenty of reminders for why the attendees are there in the first place. Parker nicely explores and sometimes explodes conventions: Must a baby shower be the exclusive turf of women? Can people who hate meetings be persuaded that they’re something other than a “Massive Exciting Opportunity for a Panic Attack”? To the detriment of a book that focuses on sharp significance, the author sometimes allows her anecdotes on successful and unsuccessful gathering to run on until they’re out of steam, violating her own principle: “If you are going to hold your guests captive, you had better do it well.” And readers who detest business jargon won’t be happy with phrases like, “we didn’t gauge their buy-in.” Fortunately, such lapses are outweighed by Parker’s enthusiastically delivered formulas for better get-togethers, from “sprout speeches” to accepting that time is fleeting and that the good planner will strive to make a meeting different and memorable.
Useful to those whose job it is to plan meetings, conferences, and the like and a worthy survival manual for consumers of the same.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59463-492-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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