An entertaining and insightful guide for strangers doing business in strange lands.
Molinsky and Hahn help international managers navigate unfamiliar languages, awkward conversations, embarrassing gaffes, and other obstacles in this savvy business guide.
The authors (Molinsky is a management professor at Brandeis, Hahn an intercultural communications expert) note that, with most big companies having sales, partners, and employees in foreign countries, a nuanced understanding of other cultures is a must for harmonious working relationships. They explore common errors of cross-cultural expectations and the “6 P’s” of relationship building, which include gauging Power imbalances (no American-style schmoozing with the boss in hierarchical Japan) and identifying Places where relationships grow (skipping tea with officemates will mark you as a standoffish jerk in Belfast). Molinsky and Hahn spotlight many stories of cultural misunderstandings culled from interviews. These include the American who thought his Japanese boss’s effusive praise of his idea was sincere when it was actually just the polite Japanese way of saying it was awful, and the plain-spoken Polish IT team that didn’t register their Indian colleagues’ indirect hints that they couldn’t meet a deadline. The authors approach workplace social psychology in a largely anecdotal way, but they also provide systematic, practical tips on the fundamental relational art of conversation, from initiating small talk (comment on the food if nothing else comes to mind) to gracefully exiting a dull chat (“I have to go in a few minutes, but before I go, I’d love to hear. . .”). They convey all this in prose that’s vivid and punchy, as in one vignette of a thunderous civilizational clash between a nonplussed French executive and the Yankee HR manager who made employees toss a ball of yarn around in a teambuilding exercise (“‘How could you demean and humiliate me and everyone in there?’ Philippe screamed. ‘You made us look like children…Your idea was ludicrous—and so typically American’”). Readers will find this a useful primer on dealing with people abroad and at home.
An entertaining and insightful guide for strangers doing business in strange lands.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2024
ISBN: 978-1265212339
Page Count: 256
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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