A clearheaded guide to building the mental muscles needed to lead teams through adversity to success.
Mautz offers a concise overview of best practices for confident, decisive, and effective business leadership.
In his fourth book, the author, a former Procter & Gamble senior executive, distills his principles of “mental strength” into a concise how-to guide for personal development. Drawing on experience and research, Mautz defines mentally strong leaders as those who have “the ability to regulate their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors to achieve exceptional outcomes, despite circumstances.” (He’s careful to differentiate this concept from general mental health.) The author provides a bit of background in a brief introduction, then dives into detailing what mental strength is, what it isn’t, its key traits, and why it matters, illustrating his points with brief stories. Mautz asks, “How mentally strong are you?” and presents a 50-question self-assessment to help readers identify existing strengths and areas for “leveling up.” (The text helpfully correlates the assessment questions section by section to inform specific habit-building tools in later chapters.) Chapters are dedicated to six leadership habits, including Fortitude, Confidence, Boldness, Messaging, Decision-Making, and Goal-Focus. In turn, each of these comprises several sub-habits that are paired with corresponding tools. (For example, the tool for the confidence habit “Exude Executive Presence” is the “Integrated Aura model.”) Each tool is explained in detail and includes an initial small step for getting started and a helpful tactic for bouncing back from the inevitable lapses. The final chapter features a “MAP (Mental Action Plan)” that guides readers toward maintaining a regular practice for building their own habits. Diagrams and charts illustrate many of the tools, and each chapter also includes a list of references. Templates for many of the suggested exercises and the MAP are available for download from the author’s website, both singly and collected in a workbook format.
The author’s insights into what makes leaders and their teams effective are astute and well explained, and his recommendations are eminently sensible. While the book may not break new ground, it presents useful ideas—such as identifying limiting beliefs, cultivating self-acceptance as an antidote to perfectionism, paying attention to what’s not being said, and reframing problems as challenges—accessibly and persuasively. The text is organized in a way that’s easy for readers to follow and refer back to as needed. Mautz’s prose style is crisp, direct, and down to earth, and his tone is consistently upbeat, empathetic, and encouraging: On procrastination, he writes, “Consider the pain of not completing the task. If there isn’t any, by the way, consider eliminating the task…the next time you catch yourself slipping back into procrastination, give yourself a pat on the back—you noticed it! No small feat.” The pithy advice on difficult conversations includes such nuggets as “Focus on the predicament, not the personality”; “The pain is temporary, the positive is permanent”; and “Am I just confusing ‘difficult’ with ‘different’?” In today’s fast-paced, constantly changing workplaces, “where adversity is becoming the norm more than ever, where the things that wear us down, professionally and personally, are in ever-increasing supply,” this book is a welcome addition to the professional development tool kit for thoughtful and ambitious business leaders.
A clearheaded guide to building the mental muscles needed to lead teams through adversity to success.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781510780583
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Peakpoint Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
PERSPECTIVES
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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