A remarkably all-inclusive one-stop guide to corporate citizenship.
Tkaczyk offers a comprehensive guide to navigating the evolving intricacies of the modern business landscape.
Drawing on his long experience as a corporate educator, the author presents a wide array of granularly detailed information about all aspects of the business world, from communication to strategizing to design innovation to product management and beyond. Each of the book’s chapters comes with extensive source-citations, and they are broken into many subsections: These include “sneak peeks” that provide bullet-pointed previews of the chapters’ contents; “pause ‘n’ reflect” moments to vary the pacing; numbered units to further break down information (“Practical ‘choice architecture,’ which refers to designing user-friendly environments, can effectively nudge individuals toward the best decision without limiting their freedom to choose”); general discussion points; identifications of key elements; “journal entry” spaces for answering prompt questions; and so on. Tkaczyk peppers his various discussions with questions for his readers—these can range from asking what readers would do in a specific circumstance to far broader inquiries into philosophical matters (“What do we genuinely care about?” the author asks. “Do we assume that all human systems are inclined toward the highest aspirations of humankind?”) The text is deeply grounded in executive theories of all kinds (the “deep dive” reference listings are invaluable), with regular reminders to readers about the dynamic nature of the modern, internationally connected business world. These reminders frequently take the form of questions: “Chinese companies are reinventing management,” Tkaczyk writes. “What can Western companies learn from innovative Chinese companies when doing business with the new China?”
The most remarkable feature of the book is the enormous amount of highly detailed data Tkaczyk manages to cram into 300 pages. He’s helped in this by the book’s design: The chapters contain almost no long-form narrative content—instead, the author lays out a fragmented, bullet-pointed, typographically varied landscape full of margin-symbols, bold type, and numbered lines in place of paragraphs. Of course, all the format-fiddling in the world wouldn’t matter if the book weren’t also engagingly written; Tkaczyk employs a very clear and direct prose style that’s both highly readable and very specific. He has a knack for stating blunt truths without scorn or blame, as when he mentions the demands of critical strategizing: “Most people lack the proper educational foundation for it,” he points out, “and organizations don’t typically provide the necessary training either.” The author’s fondness for management guru Henry Mintzberg hits a sour note with his quote of Mintzberg’s grandiose and very questionable assertion that “No job is more vital to our society than that of the manager,” and some of Tkaczyk’s own proclamations may also raise eyebrows: “In today’s knowledge-creative economy,” the author writes, “enterprises of all sizes, in all industries, are under growing pressure to uphold social and ethical standards from the public, investors, and the government.” (Considering the “social and ethical standards” displayed by some of those institutions, readers may wonder what planet he occupies.) Still, Tkaczyk’s focus is refreshingly centered on people as well as profits—as he reiterates at many points, in his own field of consulting, an assignment is only successful if it leaves the client in a better place; not necessarily only financially, but also creatively…and, yes, even ethically.
A remarkably all-inclusive one-stop guide to corporate citizenship.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9781032832081
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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