Smart and methodical advice; especially applicable to those just starting their careers.
This debut guide suggests applying a marketing plan model to career development.
Alharbi, a former manager at Saudi Aramco and co-founder of two paper industry companies, believes a corporate marketing plan can also be important for a person seeking a career. If an individual does not follow the same strategy, writes the author, “you will end up in a recurring cycle of trying to find a job, then finding a job in which you try your best to align with the employer’s plans, then leaving the job or staying without achieving the growth you desire.” The idea has merit; Alharbi follows through by first using an example of a company owner who wants to market a product, showing how a business plan should be devised. The plan covers situation analysis, marketing goals and strategies, tactics, implementation, and control/feedback. For those unfamiliar with developing a marketing-focused plan, this is a brief but solid primer. The author then proposes a “Career Marketing Plan Template” that essentially adapts the strategy for personal use. The remainder of the book cleverly illustrates how that plan can be developed and implemented. For some, making the leap from promoting a product to packaging themselves as a marketable commodity may be challenging, but Alharbi guides readers through a carefully structured process. Using a real example of a young man who set a goal of becoming the president of a company, the author shows how one can develop a vision at a very early age by using “strategic thrusts” to support that idea, leading to concrete goals and tactical objectives. Next, the author moves on to analyzing the employment pool, assessing the “competition” (other candidates for a position), creating a personal value proposition, and marketing one’s skills and experience. Alharbi spends considerable time discussing the implementation of a career marketing plan and offers helpful suggestions, including how to assess feedback from others. Most chapters include questions to answer and exercises. The result is a clearly written, intelligently packaged, systematic approach to career development.
Smart and methodical advice; especially applicable to those just starting their careers.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-398-43808-8
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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