An earnest business book that offers a readable but ultimately uneven blend of fiction and nonfiction.
Gottlieb presents a story-focused guide to improving managerial attitudes.
The author begins his debut volume with a “parable”—a fictional segment that tells the story of a man named George Warren. He’s a single dad, raising his daughter, Amelia, and struggling with the many challenges of running Warren Construction, the company he owns. “Ever since I became owner…my life has felt like one of those horror movies where you invite the friendly vampire into your house, and before you know it, you’re one of the undead,” George reflects. He has clients and projects, but his work is often hampered by his inability to get all his workers on the same page. He’s feeling hopeless when he meets successful businessman Marty Gold, owner of True North Improvements, who gives him a tour of his own company, whose employees have gratitude and enthusiasm. Marty then introduces George to the five pillars of management: that one’s belief is transferable, that managers need checklists, and that effective leaders shape their business’s culture with purpose and direction, are aware of their own voice’s “echo,” and use their business as a training organization. Marty’s mentoring turns George’s business around, and in the book’s second half, Gottlieb shifts from storytelling to exposition to elaborate on the five pillars, using charts, graphs and other illustrations to provide “actionable insights that will help you create a more aligned team.” A number of leadership books use fictional vignettes to highlight their lessons, but they aren’t as well done as Gottlieb’s, which is genuinely engaging and reads like a good novel. The second half, however, is less effective, in part because it offers a view of work as a life-consuming experience that many leaders, and many prospective employees, may not share, as when he asserts that stress can be erased by not believing in it: “Stress won’t kill you unless you believe it will. That is because belief is one of the most powerful energies in the universe. A positive belief about yourself will inspire a limitless mindset.”
An earnest business book that offers a readable but ultimately uneven blend of fiction and nonfiction.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798887504315
Page Count: 216
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2024
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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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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