Richly detailed, engaging advice on making changes, delivered with honesty and sincerity.
A manual offers a prescription for change for small-business owners.
Entrepreneur/investor Moltz has written numerous books for small-business owners, including How To Get Unstuck (2014) and Small Business Hacks (2019). While the author claims this work was “the easiest one to write so far,” it is arguably the most uncomfortable topic for business owners. The fact is, change is exceedingly hard, and Moltz doesn’t downplay that reality. Instead, he explores reasons why people resist change and the research behind it. He then devotes more than half of the guide to how to make modifications, which he terms becoming a “ChangeMaster.” The preamble provides six reasons why change is problematic—a valid setup for what is to come. The following chapter presents a soberingly frank look at the personal aspects, in which the author relates his own struggles making alterations in his private and business life. Next come two chapters delving into brain science—admittedly somewhat technical, as Moltz notes in his disclaimer. Still, the material is useful in that it connects the act of changing with some of the biological reasons why the process is difficult. The bulk of the book centers on mastering change, beginning with two general chapters on making personal alterations and helping others make adjustments. They include sections about modifying the company culture and facilitating change among employees.
The subsequent chapters follow a very different path, demonstrating how to create change in various areas of business. This portion of the manual should be extremely valuable to small-business owners because of the facets the author selected for discussion: sales and marketing, money management, customer relations, productivity, and personal change. The strength of these individual chapters is not just in the content, but also in the structure. Each chapter unfolds in a problem/solution format as Moltz offers salient suggestions for “Where To Start To Make the Change” and “How To Analyze.” Perhaps most important, the author turns the tables on readers by noting that they will likely not want to take the necessary first steps in each area, so he advises them to “Take These Next Steps Instead.” For example, in the chapter concerning money management, Moltz acknowledges a business owner’s angst: “Looking at the numbers will be hard since you may be afraid of what the actual numbers say, especially when they are not in sync with what you thought in your head.” He then recommends specific steps to take to ease the anxiety, counseling readers on how best to “Measure Successful Change.” These chapters in particular show the author’s keen understanding of small-business challenges. In the concluding chapter, Moltz again shares his experiences with a disarming degree of candor. By pointing to his own vulnerabilities and describing the alterations that he finished and plans to complete, the author very effectively models appropriate change behavior for others. Appended to the book is an exceedingly useful “Change Worksheet” Moltz created with “The 20 Steps To Execute a Successful Change.”
Richly detailed, engaging advice on making changes, delivered with honesty and sincerity.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64687-062-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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
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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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