A satisfying handbook for future moguls.
A readable study of the habits of mind of successful corporate leaders.
Ever since In Search of Excellence was released in 1982, there’s been a surge of books, good and bad, on how to run businesses better. Falling toward the good-to-middling part of the spectrum, this book takes a familiar tack: interview CEOs (refreshingly, not just the usual suspects), find out what makes them tick, and formulate a set of maxims and observations: “the best CEOs…are exceptional futurists,” for instance, studying the commercial landscape closely and even obsessively to forecast trends and shifts. “Doing so enables them to place bets before these trends become conventional wisdom and to maintain conviction when others inevitably criticize their choices,” write the authors, who worked from a list of some 2,000 CEOs and narrowed it to exclude leaders with terms of fewer than six years. Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill increased Alcoa’s revenues fivefold during his tenure as CEO not just by pushing the company’s products, but by giving employees a sense of ownership and “creating a habit of excellence.” Brad Smith of Intuit did much the same thing by broadcasting meetings with his dozen-odd direct reports to the “top 400 leaders in the company,” giving them an opportunity to buy into the organizational culture and goals of the firm. Gail Kelly, former CEO of Westpac, emphasizes the importance of building strong relationships with the company’s board members, especially its chair, while many other leaders struggle to balance time spent within the company and with external stakeholders, with an average of about 30% spent on the latter, “but with a high standard deviation.” Several leaders insist that work can’t be all-consuming but also that leadership has to center on things that can be controlled, especially where one devotes time and effort. The authors include practical worksheets and bios of the contributors, which include the heads of Mastercard, General Motors, and Duke Energy.
A satisfying handbook for future moguls.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982179-67-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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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