A compassionate plan for navigating ethical blind spots.
Sturesson fleshes out the tenets of responsible leadership.
The author opens his nonfiction debut with a concise account of his own traumatic past: The Christian community to which he and his parents belonged gradually devolved into a cult from which all three of them had to struggle to extract themselves. “How could an organization seemingly driven by a noble mission become so toxic?” he asks when reflecting on these events (and broadening them to form the basis of this book). “How did I, someone who perceived myself as an ethical and values-driven leader, become complicit in psychological abuse?” Sturesson proposes and explicates a series of habits and practices to allow leaders to take ownership, take action, and become a part of positive change, always with the reminder that “it’s not about framing yourself as the hero.” The habits are generally broad and simple, detailed under headings like “Get Humble” or “Get Integrity.” The author’s elaborations (“values cannot give us all the answers. However, they should help us wrestle with vital questions about priorities, decisions, and behaviors”), drawn from his own experiences as well as the writings of well-known motivational books like Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) or Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), are laid out with illustrations and bullet points. These elements, conveyed by Sturesson’s light, highly readable prose style, make the book a refreshing reminder of the basics of both responsible corporate culture and ethical interpersonal dealings. When the author writes things like “By focusing first on what you have the ability to control or influence, you will be much better positioned to help bring positive change,” Sturesson is teaching his readers about compassionate self-control in ways that effectively blend the fields of business motivation and self-help.
A compassionate plan for navigating ethical blind spots.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9798891381544
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 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
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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