Women seeking leadership positions will find innovative tools in this useful work.
A playbook aims to help women topple today’s leadership barriers.
This third volume in Nanton’s scholarly series on female leaders offers methods to counteract dynamics that have traditionally stifled women’s advancement in the workforce. She characterizes hard-wired women as people “of power” who are “destined to lead and take dominion.” The founder and CEO of Carmel Connections Inc., the author is a speaker, educator, leadership strategist, and executive coach who clearly wants to shake up the status quo. Her goal is for the percentage of women to rise from 5% to 30% of all C-level professionals by 2030. Nanton calls this volume a modern-day playbook to spark a paradigm shift in the workplace. She urges readers, regardless of their sex, to embrace women’s promotions and to collaborate in reconstructing leadership practices. Before digging into the book, readers should take a look at the epilogue, which concisely lays out the author’s perspective. The comprehensive work is a smorgasbord of well-established leadership principles and theories, which she expands on and applies. Two particularly absorbing methods she developed are the Strategic Connections Profile for identifying leadership capital and C.L.E.A.R., a five-step framework for crucial organizational changes, based on culture, learning, evaluation, application, and review/reflection. The volume is heavily annotated and takes the tone of a treatise. It would be a worthwhile text or supplemental reading for a college program in business or women’s studies. Parts of the book are replete with obscure historical concepts, such as Ronald Heifetz’s Bathsheba syndrome and Paulo Freire’s theory of radical learning, which may be a draw for intellectual and academic readers. But those seeking practical solutions may glean more from the lighter sections, such as Nanton’s discussion of reverse mentoring (which she illustrates by alluding to the TV show Undercover Boss). Sharing her practical experiences through anecdotes would have added an element of liveliness. Her clear takeaway message to hard-wired women: “Have the courage to lead. Just Lead.”
Women seeking leadership positions will find innovative tools in this useful work.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9862111-6-4
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Carmel Connections Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2021
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
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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