A forceful effort to help CEOs understand the hidden goals they pursue.
CEO adviser Cox (Straight Talk for Monday Morning, 1999, etc.) offers up a formula of sorts designed to get CEOs, or anyone for that matter, to understand a concept he calls “grounding.” Getting grounded, Cox writes, helps one “become more aware of your unique talent, to harness that talent to your unique Destiny, and to achieve extraordinary results.” Acknowledging the work of psychologist Alfred Adler, the author promotes the notion that everyone must identify their hidden “Style-of-Life”—“an organized set of convictions about life, [of] which the individual, at best, is only dimly aware.” What could easily have turned into conceptual claptrap is instead a very practical working guide that demands a serious amount of self-examination; in fact, the author is unafraid to share the results of delving into his own life, making his book refreshingly approachable. Cox leads the reader through a mature discussion that addresses such knotty topics as goals, changes, boundaries, visions and futures. In each chapter, Cox includes the requisite real-world examples and a good deal of guidance based on his considerable experience advising CEOs of major corporations and nonprofit organizations. Also present for the busy CEO are end-of-chapter summaries and “punch lists” that exhort readers to take proactive steps. Extremely beneficial are the interactive questionnaires and checklists, albeit with cutesy titles such as the “2:00 A.M. I Am Questionnaire,” the “CEO Boundaries Quiz” and the “YC (Your Company) Identity Kit.” Clearly, Cox has figured out that CEOs like to check things off and answer questions instead of just read text. Of particular interest to CEOs who are stubbornly individualistic is the final chapter, “Mentors,” in which Cox writes eloquently about “the power of ‘with’ ”: “Do you want authentic power? Yes? Then share it with others. You want people to follow you? Travel with them….It’s not CEO and team; it’s CEO with team; not leadership or management, but leadership with management.”
Nicely packaged and well-wrought, with the potential to shake up many an executive’s conventional thinking.
Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-1938610035
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Harrier Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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