A thorough, confidence-inspiring guide that provides much more than a quick start.
Project management trainer Croft offers a manual for beginners that also provides a wealth of advice for those with experience.
This clear, accessible guide promises to enable readers who aren’t project management specialists to “manage any project, of any size, with any budget” by using a practical 12-step process for planning, monitoring, adjusting, and reviewing them. The process requires no unusual tools or software expertise—just sticky notes and spreadsheets. The explanation is organized into five main sections: “Project Management Overview,” “Mapping Out the Ideal Plan,” “Adjusting the Plan for Reality,” “Managing the Implementation of Your Project,” and “Supercharge Your Project Management Skills.” A final section offers brief discussions of related topics for further exploration. Croft begins by defining a project as “a structured way of facilitating the delivery of change,” then takes readers through every stage from initial brainstorming to final review after completion. Along the way, he offers step-by-step methods and useful tips for getting stakeholders onboard, defining the project’s “critical path” (the series of tasks that determines how long it will take), creating and using Gantt charts, managing expectations and people, assessing and mitigating risk, planning for contingencies, and more. The prose is crisp and readable, the examples effective, and the tone matter-of-fact with touches of humor. The author demystifies intimidating terms of art such as PMBOK and cost-performance index and lists pros and cons of various project management methods. Croft is frank about inevitable difficulties and thoughtful about how best to address them. In fact, many key principles and a lot of the advice here could be usefully applied in many other aspects of business and life. Charts and tables illustrate important topics, and each chapter ends with a bullet-pointed recap of key ideas. The guide includes links to short video clips and other downloadable assets, such as document templates, and is attractively designed; it also features a glossary, references, and an index.
A thorough, confidence-inspiring guide that provides much more than a quick start.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63610-060-9
Page Count: 372
Publisher: ClydeBank Media LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2022
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
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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