A forcefully written and thought-provoking breakdown of effective communication at home and work.
Chronis, a California-based pediatrician, presents a strategy for improving team culture at home and the workplace.
As the author points out right at the start of his book, most of us face the same stressors in life: constant obligations, unrealistic deadlines, strained family interactions, and overwhelming financial pressures, among other things. These stressors are equally present in work and family life, and the author asks readers to consider some basic questions: What type of work environment do you want to create? Would you like to be part of a winning team? Do you want to raise independent, self-reliant people who share close connections with you? To what extent do you take responsibility for actual situations falling short of what would be ideal? In these pages, Chronis offers strategies for strengthening connections with family members, which can then be adapted to functional approaches used in the collaborative atmosphere of a work scenario. (“Home is always more important than work,” he stresses before quipping, “As an added plus, odds are slim that your child will quit and walk out on you.”) He goes into detail on the various aspects of team culture, from trust to empowerment to communication, all of which are essential to a healthy family life but can also be applied to work relationships. “Encouraging communication among coworkers helps reduce the top-down decision-making that is commonly seen among leadership,” he writes. “When the team is involved in defining direction, buy-in is improved and goals are more easily achieved.” To help illustrate these points, the author often draws on his own life story, relating anecdotes that can be both touching and wryly funny (“I always joke that my dad taught me to aim low and stay there”).
“The fundamentals of connecting with one’s children at home and honing an enduring team culture at work are the same skill sets,” Chronis maintains throughout the book; readers may balk at this assertion, since there is—and ought to be—a world of difference between family dynamics and workplace relationships. When the author declares that “the lessons learned from creating a meaningful bond with your children will help you define your role in building a strong, successful organization,” some may find the implications off-putting, since employees in a business organization probably don’t want their bosses exercising parental authority over them. Fortunately, readers who can overlook this slightly disturbing conflation will find a good deal of very insightful guidance about parenting, quite apart from the business setting; Chronis provides excellent advice on everything from negotiating day care to dealing with temper tantrums to establishing meaningful punishments. (“Consequences that are too light will have your little ones walking all over you,” he writes. “When the consequences are too severe, your children’s defiance will carry into their adulthood.”) And perhaps his passion for addressing the essentials of good relationships in general will convince some readers that there’s more overlap between the dynamics of home and work than they had originally thought, since sentiments like “Encouragement plays a big part in helping someone to mature and grow in a healthy way” can certainly apply to both.
A forcefully written and thought-provoking breakdown of effective communication at home and work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9780991341740
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2026
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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