An engaging psychological perspective on achieving success at work.
McGee adapts a core psychological principle to the world of business.
In this debut business book, the author, a sales and product manager, takes the familiar concept of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—the idea that basic survival requirements must be met before people can focus on higher-level cognitive, aesthetic, and self-actualizing accomplishments—and applies it to the workplace. After a review of the history of the idea, including Abraham Maslow’s own attempts to apply it to the business world, McGee devotes a chapter to each category of needs, from the physiological to the transcendent, to explore how people can maximize their performance at work and find success in a corporate setting. Using examples from his own career and from published research, the author discusses how readers should seek to improve their physical health by eating well, exercising, and sleeping enough; build a team of employees with a solid and cohesive culture; learn to tolerate discomfort as an important step toward achieving more; and develop a sense of grace and gratitude in the face of hardship. McGee makes frequent references to popular authors like Tim Ferriss, Malcolm Gladwell, Arianna Huffington, and Eric Ries, and he does an excellent job of concisely summarizing relevant works. The author also helpfully provides a clear-eyed look at the mistakes he himself has made on the way to success (“Early in my career, I would beat myself up for every minor failure, holding back a key learning opportunity when challenges arose”), including moments of vulnerability that make his achievements seem more the product of concerted work than mere luck. While the book’s core concepts will be familiar to readers who have more than a passing acquaintance with business books, McGee’s enthusiasm and his use of Maslow’s hierarchy as a framing device for his advice add a unique twist that may draw in pop psychology readers as well.
An engaging psychological perspective on achieving success at work.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2025
ISBN: 9798891651982
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Streamline Books
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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