A reassuring guide to empowerment.
How to foster positive responses to stress.
Ramalingam, a specialist in international crisis management and executive director of the United Kingdom Humanitarian Innovation Hub, draws on research in neuroscience and psychology, as well as his own experiences, to offer practical advice on how to respond to stress and pressure. “With too little stress and pressure,” he asserts, “we become disengaged, de-motivated, and unfulfilled.” On the other hand, moments of crisis may inspire us “to transcend our limitations, and to overcome the inertia of habits, the weight of accepted practices, and the thick treacle of institutional memory.” He counters the assumption “that stress and pressure kill performance and creativity” by examining many real-life examples—from Capt. Chesley Sullenberger to Greta Thunberg—to show “how there are in fact liberating opportunities to be found even in the most extreme of conditions.” Ramalingam identifies three traits that foster creativity under stress: mental attitude (“our subjective assessment of whether something is a threat or a challenge”); our ability to engage in original thinking; and our having a sense of purpose. He further identifies six styles of “upshifting”: Challengers explore problems to look for “novel adaptations to the new reality rather than expecting reality to adapt to their beliefs.” Crafters, such as Thomas Edison, bring creativity and skill to develop practical solutions to problems. Connectors forge networks to provide support and insight. Combiners build bridges between disciplines and translate different areas of knowledge. Corroborators pose questions, explore approaches, and assess the consequences of actions. Conductors bring the skills of orchestra leaders to problem-solving in areas beyond music by instilling courage, creating space to improvise, and sharing a sense of the big picture. Ramalingam is encouraging throughout the book, urging readers to reframe problems and believe in their own innate abilities to enact change.
A reassuring guide to empowerment.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781250792952
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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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
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