Timely and practical advice for workers navigating a disruptive shift in workplace culture.
Mandel’s persuasive workplace guide reframes artificial intelligence as a powerful subordinate, rather than an existential threat.
The author, who spent more than two decades working at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, models his thesis on a foundational distinction between workplace production (tasks) and delivery (ownership). Tasks might be “exposed” to the automation of AI, he asserts, without necessarily eliminating the job entirely. Delivery requires validation of AI’s work, he adds, recognizing the enduring worth of human judgment. The book names three linked roles: The “Guardian” protects reliability by catching errors; the “Craftsman” uses “applied knowledge” to ensure the output serves the overall purpose; and the “Decider” provides accountability. (Mandel models the latter quality by acknowledging AI assistance with portions of his draft while accepting responsibility for its ultimate content.) He stresses that AI remains fallible, and he identifies failure modes on both sides: AI can hallucinate and drift, he notes, and users may blindly trust AI outputs and mistake its excessive praise for sound, critical judgment. Mandel distinguishes the Craftsman, who directs AI within a defined problem, from the “Creator,” who recognizes when the wrong question has been posed. Especially strong is Mandel’s argument that AI might have the effect of dividing work into two categories: inexpensive automated production and premium work with human judgment. Mandel’s book is lucid and grounded in specific workplace examples. For instance, he explores how travel agents who moved from routine booking to complex advisory work had mixed results: Expertise commanded a premium, but employment contracted across the sector. Rejecting easy reassurance, he also notes that some task-heavy jobs offer no advancement, which requires workers to carry their accumulated knowledge into new roles. At times, reiteration and repetition slow the author’s argument, and some claims about inherently human capacities seem to go beyond what the evidence supports. Still, Mandel’s real-world experience and extensive notes lend authority to a clear-eyed technology discussion.
Timely and practical advice for workers navigating a disruptive shift in workplace culture.Pub Date: July 16, 2026
ISBN: 979-8187636914
Page Count: 215
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
