An outstanding performance playbook.
A debut business book offers advice from business leaders and athletes on achieving peak performance.
There is an elegant simplicity to this work that belies its depth. Beneath the surface of what seems to be a straightforward guide relying on an acronym is rich content deserving of serious consideration. Gillette’s own intriguing experiences as an endurance athlete, coupled with words of wisdom from over 100 fascinating people, make for compelling reading. The author’s credentials as a past human resources professional and current performance coach add to the volume’s veracity. The book is divided into five “pillars,” four of which are represented by the acronym EPIC (“Envision, Plan, Iterate, Collaborate”); the fifth one is “Perform.” Each pillar is succinctly summarized at the beginning by Gillette, who also helpfully includes synonyms, such as Dream and Conceptualize for Envision. Each pillar comprises three chapters, or “behaviors.” This structure cleverly provides continuity across the pillars, and it enhances the readability by breaking the text into manageable bites. Chapters are equally consistent; each one starts with a relevant quotation and ends with “Questions To Ask Yourself” and “Exercises,” helping readers to engage with the material and maintain focus. The author often refers to his remarkable athletic challenges—such as running races that were hundreds of miles—using them metaphorically to relate to personal and business leadership. These anecdotes are integrated with descriptions of business leaders’ challenges as well as their observations, all nicely fitting into the appropriate pillar. The Iterate pillar is particularly absorbing because it focuses on “trying, failing, tweaking, and trying again until you get it more right and then moving on.” The counsel conveyed in this section is especially valuable, including “Practicing when it doesn’t matter pays dividends when it does matter”; “You get what you inspect, not what you expect”; and “Big problems are easy to see but hard to fix, while little problems are hard to see but easy to fix.” These are a few examples of the meaningful, memorable lines that frequently appear in the work and should resonate with any high achiever.
An outstanding performance playbook.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63755-217-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
