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
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
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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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