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
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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