A valuable read for executives and small-business owners looking to establish a healthy company culture with a safe work...
Debut author Schultz and Fielkow’s (Driving to Perfection, 2014) book delves into the process of setting up and maintaining a strong safety culture in the workplace.
One of the most cherished business truisms is that safety and productivity are mutually exclusive goals: improve one and the other will go down in quality. Schultz and Fielkow, in this densely written work, argue that this doesn’t have to be the case and that a well-designed, top-down safety culture can maximize both aspects. They present a plan for developing such a culture and for keeping it strong in the face of inevitable erosion, which the authors describe as “normalization of deviance”—the tendency of employees, over time, to get comfortable with skipping safety precautions. The authors begin by stressing that only a company that already has a healthy overall culture can make safe practices a value rather than a priority; priorities can change, they say, but values are set in bedrock. They also clarify that safety policies show employees that executives are putting their well-being first, which helps them to become more invested in the company and their work. The authors describe in detail the basic requirements for building such an environment, along with challenges to expect. In the book’s second part, they begin with a case study and then go into more specific steps for creating a safety culture, with a focus on how to get employees involved with and committed to the new system. Schultz and Fielkow provide some innovative and clever ways to get frontline staff on board with new safety initiatives (such as a “CEO for a day” exercise) and even suggest ideas for getting employees’ families involved in the company culture. The book’s language can be a bit dry and convoluted (“Engaged people vested in the organizational success is the hardest component for a competitor to replicate”). However, stories from the authors’ own experiences help to enliven the text; Fielkow, for instance, owns a transportation company, and the authors provide a lot of examples of how he implemented ideas outlined in the book.
A valuable read for executives and small-business owners looking to establish a healthy company culture with a safe work environment.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Mill City Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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