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
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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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