An intensely personal guide to better self-esteem and kind but forceful management.
A detailed look at how to become a better leader through self-understanding.
Executive coach Barber says that she wrote this book in order to show people that anyone can change how they see themselves—and how others see them. The author confesses that she went through many years in the business world feeling “invisible” to management, until she decided to make a change, leave her position at Kraft Heinz in 2015, and become a leadership coach. She devotes her energies, she says, to helping others improve how they see themselves, and show them how to use their new realizations to help them become better leaders. She cites the old saw that “people don't leave companies, they leave managers,” and clarifies it, noting that “a bad manager who creates drama and, in some cases, a hostile work environment is a serious problem.” Unfortunately, she writes, too many leaders feel insecure, and a management style based on this feeling can have deleterious effects on people they manage. Barber smoothly weaves together stories from her own experience and case studies from coaching clients and co-workers she’s known, relating wide variety of scenarios involving workers in various capacities whose self-doubt or lack of clarity kept them in the “shadows,” and lacking the confidence to realize their own power. Her wish in all of this, she states, is “for everyone to see the value they bring and be able to talk about it.” In clear and ringingly optimistic prose, she effectively encourages her readers to throw off self-limiting beliefs that readers will find familiar, such as “I am not qualified to do this,” or “everybody else is good at this, but I am not,” and so on. Other readers may feel that some of this optimism may go too far; there are such things as qualifications, after all, that are based on different levels of skill and expertise. That said, its earnestness is genuine, and many in Barber’s audience will find that such positive feedback is exactly what they need to hear.
An intensely personal guide to better self-esteem and kind but forceful management.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73761-044-1
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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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