With engaging examples and exercises, Shotton’s book will help reflective leaders reach new heights in self-awareness.
Businesswoman and pilot Shotton charts a course for helping leaders reflect on their character and conduct.
Each chapter represents one of Shotton’s 10 essential leadership qualities, which are illustrated through a smattering of short anecdotes and examples. To review and inspire reflection, end of chapter exercises have readers contemplating personal leadership through academic ranking and writing exercises. Although much of the book’s style and message will be familiar to readers who pursue the business self-help genre, the author’s use of flight analogies and anecdotes makes the book stand out. Flight and piloting stories are present in anecdotes, short stories and even reflected in the descending chapter-numbering system that mimics a space mission countdown. The flight anecdotes succeed in piloting the reader through the text, which is much needed in this genre characteristically deficient in narrative threads. Reading the book from cover to cover is a breeze, but leaders in the C-suite who are looking for a guide they can easily scan will find the book’s subheadings nondescript. The book may prove more useful to middle managers, interested in self-reflection and aspiring toward a higher position. Another issue is that the author does more to set up her authority as an airplane pilot than as a leadership expert, saying in the beginning only that she is a “business leader.” Flipping to the author bio and back jacket hardly satisfy the question of what experience makes the author credible to write a book on leadership. By the back third of the book, anecdotes on the author’s leadership become more illustrative, but future editions could use some of this discussion in the prologue. Despite these shortcomings, the author’s anecdotes and end of chapter exercises will entertain and should help self-reflecting leaders better understand their current leadership style strengths and shortcomings.
With engaging examples and exercises, Shotton’s book will help reflective leaders reach new heights in self-awareness.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0825306471
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Beaufort
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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