Well-grounded arguments for effective leadership.
The benefits of an expert-led world.
Drawing on more than 15 years of empirical research, Goodall, a professor of leadership at London’s Bayes Business School, makes her book debut with a persuasive argument about the need for expertise in leaders. “When non-experts are put in charge of organizations,” she writes, “disaster often strikes.” She attributes the devaluing of expertise to a growing distrust of authority, a populist bent toward “majority decision-making,” and a belief “that everyone’s views are of equal validity.” While in the past, leaders emerged from those who rose through the ranks of an organization, leadership ability has come to be assessed “in terms of verbal skills” and an individual’s “personal characteristics or, more simply, their charisma.” Business schools, she asserts, have contributed to an “unfortunate shift towards generic management,” creating “business and management” as a separate academic field. Citing many examples in areas such as health care, manufacturing, sports, and technology, Goodall has found that expert leadership leads to success. Top universities are led by scholars, not outsiders recruited from business, and the best performing hospitals are led by clinicians. Basketball teams, too, “won more games if they were led by coaches who were former all-star players or had long playing careers in the NBA.” Expert leaders convey a clear sense of purpose, take a long view, create a productive work environment, perform to high standards, and signal excellence. They share their organization’s culture and values. Once experts are found, though, they often need to be persuaded to lead. Financial remuneration may help, as does their capacity “to identify psychologically as leaders.” They also need to know “that they will be developed and supported in the transition from expert to leader while being assured that they will be able to make tangible differences for the benefit of their teams, organizations, and stakeholders.”
Well-grounded arguments for effective leadership.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781541702509
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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