An inspiring primer on navigating one’s life with self-knowledge and integrity.
A public relations executive and strategy consultant provides his thoughts on how to build, wield, and retain power and influence in an everchanging world in this advice guide.
Dilenschneider helmed Hill & Knowlton from 1986 to 1991 and now leads his own public relations firm, The Dilenschneider Group. In this book, he details how to develop personal power and influence while interacting with others in order to achieve one’s desired life and career goals. Its first part focuses on self-examination: discovering what one’s passions and abilities are and collecting feedback on how one is perceived by others. This analysis, Dilenschneider asserts, is critical in informing and guiding one’s future actions and decision-making. The book then segues into offering tips regarding more specific activities, including networking (starting by cultivating three people as part of an ongoing process); effective communication (which, he says, is less about style and more about being clear in one’s messaging); and what Dilenschneider terms “memorable” management, which focuses on having respect and enthusiasm for other people’s opinions. Dilenschneider dedicates the final part of the book to a discussion of how to maintain one’s power and influence while handling crises and dealing with everchanging trends in the industry, workplace, and society. He recommends having a team and plan in place for when crises occur, and assessing what are truly “hard trends” of lasting impact in one’s personal life and workplace. Dilenschneider concludes this book with a recommendation to help and advise others—and thus pay one’s power forward.
The author’s latest offering is a well-organized work that not only provides readers with valuable, evergreen core advice, particularly regarding self-assessment, but also useful commentary on hard trends, including how the Covid-19 pandemic has transformed the workplace. In the early pages of this book, Dilenschneider acknowledges there are countless other business books on these topics available to readers, but he can correctly claim that his “comes to you from decades of experience working with some of the most successful companies in the world—and the people who lead them.” The author certainly demonstrates a distinct and authoritative viewpoint on his subject matter, even if some of the examples that he provides along the way may be quite familiar to some readers. One of them, regarding recognizing when to pivot in one’s career, tells the story of James Patterson’s moving from a career as an advertising professional to a much more successful one as an author, which is an oft-told tale. Still, Dilenschneider also offers plenty of timely strategic pointers in this book, including recommendations to stay abreast of what’s happening on social media platforms, given their power in the business world, and to recognize that the hybrid workplace is indeed the new reality. Most of all, Dilenschneider provides readers with an important and inspiring ethical directive, demonstrated through examples in his career and others’, to have an element of the “commonweal” in one’s quest for personal influence and power.
An inspiring primer on navigating one’s life with self-knowledge and integrity.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781637742938
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Matt Holt/BenBella
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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
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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