An insightful and practical leadership primer.
A veteran of many boardrooms discusses the importance of chairpersons and the elements of their success.
Hayward, the president of professional advisory practice Aldare Resources, has been a member of many boards over the years. In this book, he observes that corporate governance has become a hot topic of conversation and academic scrutiny but that a specific analysis of board chairpersons has been comparably neglected. Historically, this makes sense, as the position has typically been either a part-time job or one performed by a CEO. However, the author argues that the chairperson’s role has become more central and that it will be a “mission-critical issue” in the future. In addition to making an argument for the significance of the chairperson, Hayward discusses the “nitty gritty” of the position’s principal responsibilities and provides a general plan for how one can develop into a stellar chairperson. The position emerges, in the author’s account, as a complex amalgam of roles: facilitator, mediator of disputes, inspirational coach, strategist, and mentor. Along the way, Hayward astutely captures the peculiarity of the position: “The chair is not a boss. The chair does not have a boss.” The counsel he dispenses in this book is as particular and actionable as it is incisive, and his anatomy of decision-making is especially impressive. To illustrate his points, Hayward offers many stories here, and they’re often illuminating and charming. However, they can also be digressive, which bogs down the reading experience. The author even seems to anticipate this criticism: “Another story? You may wonder, what does this anecdote have to do with board agendas? This time, it doesn’t.” Still, his considerable experience—in his long career at the C-suite and boardroom level, he’s participated in some 500 board meetings—radiates throughout the book. Anyone looking to master the “multi-party negotiations” that define board meetings will find this a valuable resource.
An insightful and practical leadership primer.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5255-7891-5
Page Count: 276
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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