An entertaining and trenchant case for humane workplaces and enjoyable jobs.
Jobs can be fun when they include engaging work, close friendships, and a proper work-life balance, according to this warmhearted business self-helper.
Pushing back on our “shared belief that ‘work sucks,’” Groff, a consultant, argues that work should not be an ordeal of stultifying routine, stressful demands, tense relationships, and endless overwork that robs us of time for our families and souls. Instead, she contends, “most work, most days, should be fun,” with limited work hours, happy collaborations, and the mantra “What work would be the most fun to do?” as the main organizing principle. The author gives managers tips on cultivating fun teamwork: Pay back extra hours worked with extra time off (she recommends union contracts as an antidote for unreasonable overtime); eschew senseless mandates (“[d]o not under any circumstance ask people to come into an office and then spend the entire time on calls”); hold Do Nothing Days with the team just hanging out and musing on fun ideas; and readjust managerial mindsets. (“As a leader, I’m always trying to maximize the quality of work and minimize the amount of work the team is doing.”) Groff has advice for workers as well, urging them to stop putting work over all other needs, to resist “exceeding expectations” on the job when it depletes them, and to seek jobs that offer a modicum of happiness and room for the joys of life. The author distills her thinking into pithy aphorisms—“shoveling shit is fun if you like your co-shovelers”—and tart, humorous sendups of the ethos of self-sacrificing devotion to corporate demands. (“How funny would it be if we expected employers to exceed expectations with their paychecks? Ugh…just the usual two weeks’ pay. I expected more! My company is just not going above and beyond like I hoped.”) Her philosophy of fun seems tailored to the creative knowledge professions, like consulting; one wonders how it might apply to work at, say, a steel mill or a trauma center. Still, anyone who’s ever had a bad job will find themselves nodding along to Groff’s wisdom.
An entertaining and trenchant case for humane workplaces and enjoyable jobs.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781774585597
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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