A searching and cleareyed leadership blueprint for the 21st century.
An author and associate professor provides an in-depth breakdown and study of executive-level leadership in the business world.
White (Leadership and Professional Development, 2012) opens her work with a simple question: why another business leadership tome to add to the towering pile already in print? And her answer is astonishing: “There is not a book that blends into one whole the what, when, how, and why of leadership and professional development for emerging leaders and shares the secrets of executive-level leadership.” There are literally thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of volumes that do exactly this, and since White must know that, readers must search elsewhere for justification for the guide’s existence. They won’t have to look far: White is a very open and engaging writer, and she presents readers her concept of “motiva-cation”—a blend of motivation and education—as a series of elaborations on the system she has devised, the Johnson White Leadership Model. The JWLM is organized around three “modules”: Focus, Action, and Great Leadership. White—who worked at IBM in marketing, sales, and training—moves straight to the details of each one and how they interrelate. In this scheme, Focus examines the inner person and the ability to sell oneself; Action addresses interpersonal elements such as character and self-expression; and Great Leadership brings together these threads and directs them outward, concentrating on team building and thinking on the organizational level. White walks her readers through all of these larger categories and refreshingly grounds them in both a wide array of business writings by contemporary authors (and not so current: the great Dale Carnegie gets his due) and some very nuts-and-bolts analysis of modern corporate culture—differentiating, for instance, among sponsors, mentors, coaches, advisers, and role models. The author rounds everything off with a very approachable personal tone. White, a business instructor at Morehouse College in Atlanta, mentions early on that the book is suitable for seminar and academic use, and its complexity bears this out. Business students should find a great deal to interest and challenge them in these pages.
A searching and cleareyed leadership blueprint for the 21st century.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-7101-5
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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