This manual offers useful tips and tricks, encouraging readers to run the big plays themselves.
In this guide, an experienced career coach brings her self-assessment-focused training program directly to eager young professionals, classrooms, offices, and homes.
In Ward’s professional development coaching book, self-knowledge is the unwavering foundation. The author seems to be urging each potential vice president to know thyself. Aimed at aspiring artists, engineers, and, most particularly, executives, this manual asks readers the tough questions to help them develop their career goals, intentions, and unique brands by drawing on their interests, strengths, and what excites them. That brand’s presentation is no different from how products and companies market themselves, with crafted statements, long-term visions, and reliable reputations that require research and development to establish intention and consistency. To aid this “R&D,” each question asked is followed by considerable room for notes and journaling, allowing readers to reevaluate their thoughts as experience, skills, and self-knowledge increases. Along with this intense focus on self-assessment (“The roads you travel should always be aligned with who you are”), communication skills are extensively emphasized, with the guide offering straightforward breakdowns of common styles, frank appraisals of the usefulness of code switching, and clear assertions on the importance of outward appearance. Tips for navigating the workplace, from identifying the useful gatekeepers like receptionists and office managers to networking, paying dues, and avoiding gossip and drama, are sprinkled throughout; this approach makes the path to success clear as the skills and talents to take readers down that road are uncovered. The enthusiasm of an in-person coaching session is difficult to reproduce on the page, but the plentiful charts, graphs, and lists, with encouragements to engage with the text directly, serve to mitigate this. The emphasis on note taking will make this a resource to revisit, not just for its own insights, but for readers’ epiphanies as well. Ward’s role as a “Brand & Leadership Development” expert draws on her experience in both the business and entertainment worlds, which adds a legitimacy to the book’s claim of being a training resource for an array of professionals, not just would-be executives.
This manual offers useful tips and tricks, encouraging readers to run the big plays themselves.Pub Date: June 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781664298149
Page Count: 234
Publisher: WestBowPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2024
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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