A passionate, often disappointingly redundant outlook on creating stronger teams through candid communication.
A management consultant and his daughter offer ways to improve team performance.
“Mistakes and failures are springboards for opportunity and learning,” write the Smiths, a father-and-daughter team, at the outset of this conceptual outlook on team building in a corporate setting—a follow-up to Individual Advantages: Find the “I” in Team (2018). It’s only through rebuilding from failure—and the humility this engenders—that real leaders learn their craft. The authors cover creating and sustaining productive teams and seek to help managers of all kinds learn from common mistakes. Everyone has some type of influence, they assert, exerted in the “words, actions, decisions, thoughts, and reactions, or lack thereof,” that we exercise in the world. Understanding the nature and limitations of your own influence can help you assess how it interacts with potential team members’ influences. The authors recommend a series of guiding principles, including such basics as humility (“turning into an overbearing leader because of arrogance will derail the best of leaders and topple the best of organizations,” they warn—which seems odd; arrogance among leaders at all levels is quite common). Effective leaders stick close to their own values, a key strength when guiding others. “Setting your moral compass,” they write, “means upholding your personal values at all times—that is the true definition of leadership.” These and other maxims of team leadership unfold in a fast-paced series of sections with illustrations scattered throughout. The authors write with energy and clarity, often drawing on their own experiences, which are always delivered with blunt honesty—as when they illustrate the difficulty of overcoming intellectual laziness by confessing: “I have put my company at risk by being intellectually lazy, more than once.” This direct frankness prevails throughout the book and gives a very human cast to its advice.
The book’s prevailing disappointment is the authors’ heavy reliance on pat truisms. For example, burning bridges is a very personal decision, they tell us, that each person has to make for themselves. There’s much to be learned from other people if we take the time to listen, they note. The first step to owning a mistake is to take responsibility for it. When delegating there will always be a taskmaster and a task-maker. And so on. Why the authors feel the necessity to spend so much time on hackneyed old saws like these, things their readers certainly learned long ago, is a bit of a mystery, particularly since their narration makes it clear they’ve had enough professional experiences to provide far more nuanced insights. The material becomes more interesting when it moves to more psychological ground; the book is stronger when it’s dealing with, for instance, the range of emotions that accompanies periods of depression. Likewise the sections that stress how important it is for leaders to train themselves to be consistent; these contain powerful, straightforward advice about the practical applications of a cultivated positive outlook. It’s a shame that these more multifaceted approaches aren’t explored more fully.
A passionate, often disappointingly redundant outlook on creating stronger teams through candid communication.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-09-834630-0
Page Count: 220
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: June 28, 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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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