A useful, easy-to-follow guide to making the humble office anniversary party into a meaningful and memorable event.
Joi encourages managers to make workers feel appreciated and happy in this enthusiastic primer.
The author, an organizational psychologist, extols yearly celebrations of a worker’s hiring as a way to imbue an employee with a sense of purpose, belonging, and organizational support, which, he asserts, could help improve job performance by 56 percent and reduce sick days by 75 percent. Joi offers a systematic approach to making these celebratory events more impactful. He devotes much thought to the logistics of remembering anniversaries by way of start-date databases and automated notification programs that remind everyone from HR to the CEO’s secretary of a worker’s upcoming anniversary. He includes an extensive section on anniversary gifts (company-logoed apparel is good; lottery tickets are bad, because the recipient will feel disappointed and resentful when they don’t pay off; don’t give one employee a Rolex unless you give everyone a Rolex). The author details useful anniversary party roles and tips for everyone in the company, from graphic designers (make sure you spell the name right on the congratulatory certificate) to the IT department (ask employees if they need a new monitor, chair, or other equipment, then deliver it on the anniversary). Joi goes on to explore the work anniversary as a tool for the company’s social and cultural development. He recommends that managers prepare statements of praise and thanks for employees’ anniversaries, and that executives use the occasion for “skip-level” conversations with lower-level workers to listen to their gripes and mentor them on their careers; on the wilder side, he suggests staging over-the-top anniversary bonding rituals, like having a manager get on his knees to offer the employee a favorite snack. As an added bonus, Joi notes, the marketing department can use anniversary photos of happy, energetic employees to showcase the staff to prospective clients.
The book is in part a nuts-and-bolts how-to for staging work anniversaries, one that’s brimming with tips on everything from the tax implications of gift-giving to the syncing up of anniversaries with raises and performance reviews, all organized in helpful checklists and timelines and conveyed in lucid, straightforward prose that spells everything out. (“before anyone starts to eat, call out, ‘Two, four, six, eight! Whose sevenyears with XYZCorpdo we appreciate?’ and have everyone respond with the person’s name. Then say, ‘Let’s eat!’”). Joi also advances a humanistic management theory that views the employees’ psychic engagement as the key to a productive workplace and draws canny psychological insights from it: “Thinking bigger, work anniversaries have more power for an organization than birthdays because they’re uniquely about the relationship between the organization and the employee. They’re celebrating the moment the relationship began.” The prescription of cut-and-dried corporate protocols to foster deep, unfeigned social connectedness can sometimes feel a bit discordant: “On each employee’s work anniversary, authentically express—with details—how the employee is a uniquely valued member of the team. Say it. Write it. Smile it genuinely. Hug them, pat them on the back, or shake their hand (as appropriate).” Still, readers will find here a wealth of practical advice for making anniversaries more gratifying.
A useful, easy-to-follow guide to making the humble office anniversary party into a meaningful and memorable event.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798988345435
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Quintriple Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2023
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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