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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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