Carefully researched, tightly written, and timely leadership advice.
A compact treatise advances the notion of servant leadership.
Harris, a former pharmaceutical executive and the author of Leader Board (2019), believes it’s time for “a new revolution” that revolves around something he calls “servant leadership.” Drawing on the writings of numerous leadership experts, including Jim Collins, Stephen R. Covey, and Patrick Lencioni, Harris weaves together their thinking with his own beliefs to make a case for servant leaders—those who listen intently, promote teamwork, and generously share credit for success. The book moves from defining servant leadership and identifying its principles to implementing the concept. This involves building personal leadership effectiveness, learning how to use influence and “positive psychology,” developing a strong team, defining the right mission, and becoming a model leader. Each of the first seven chapters is brief but packed with insightful advice and examples. Chapter 8 reviews the key points covered and relates them to other sources. This is as much a motivational work as it is instructional. Harris frequently encourages readers to embrace servant leadership as the best way forward: “You will gain more energy, enthusiasm, positivity, proactivity, intensity, and resilience to take on greater challenges and reap the rewards of doing so.” Given the plethora of books on leadership, it is no easy task to break the mold, and many of the maxims in this volume will no doubt be recognizable to readers. Still, the author’s enthusiasm for the subject is infectious, and some of his observations are noteworthy, such as “Exceptional leaders…know where they are going, and what it will take to get there.” In addition to strongly promoting the development of effective teams, Harris correctly suggests that leaders and their companies should be laser-focused on serving customers: “Creating customer value is the key to sustainable, long-term performance.…Remember: the people who serve the customer are precious.” In an age where some may view leadership as increasingly autocratic, if not dictatorial, the humanistic view expressed by the author is reassuring.
Carefully researched, tightly written, and timely leadership advice.Pub Date: April 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73488-150-9
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Intent Books
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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: yesterday
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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