Useful advice for getting disparate personalities to work well together.
A debut business book offers a technique for understanding and working with different personalities.
In this volume, Cooper and Kerrigan present the DISC-EQ framework they use in advising businesses. The construction is based on a standard psychology model that divides people into four personality styles (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness, each abbreviated to its first letter), combined with an emotionally intelligent understanding of how those types interact. The book provides basic guidance for determining which style best fits a person (readers are also invited to complete a more substantial analysis on the volume’s companion website) and describes the primary characteristics of each. Subsequent chapters explain how the different types often conflict with one another, and how leaders can overcome those clashes and improve team performance by being aware of how personalities drive behavior, understanding the perspectives of others, and modifying their own interactions as a result. The authors use a combination of client testimonials and case studies drawn from their work to illustrate the DISC-EQ concepts and their real-world applications (“We discovered that I was an outgoing, results-driven D, whereas Jerome wasn’t a pessimistic naysayer; he was just a strong C-personality,” one manager reports). While the concepts Cooper and Kerrigan discuss are not groundbreaking—psychologists have used the DISC framework for nearly a century, and emotional intelligence was described decades ago—they cover the familiar territory effectively in the book, giving readers a substantial number of ways to turn ideas into actions. What the volume does particularly well is explore the communication styles and mental models of each personality type, accompanied by specific potential problems that arise as each type interacts with another and strategies for responding to those difficulties appropriately and productively. For instance, the authors explain how a detail-oriented C can successfully communicate with a D who prefers a big-picture overview to painstaking analysis. The book’s emphasis on the need for emotional self-awareness is also a strength—and an important message underlying the entire text.
Useful advice for getting disparate personalities to work well together.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0836-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2021
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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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