An energetic and unconventional program that valuably emphasizes telling one’s story.
Sales coach Henderson offers an innovative, multistep approach to improving sales performance.
The overriding narrative concept of this business book derives from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its classic 1939 film adaptation. He develops a picture in which readers are cast in the role of Dorothy, stepping away from an old, familiar world into something new and colorful, guided by the Scarecrow (symbolizing “mindset and learning”), the Tin Man (“emotion and storytelling”), the Cowardly Lion (“courage and executive presence”), and the Yellow Brick Road itself (“daily habits and process”). This process he calls the Oz Method, which, he writes, “will help you connect, clarify, and collaborate on solutions with your clients together.” Using examples from his many years of coaching sales clients, Henderson outlines the three typical stages of sales experience, from one-dimensional (in which professionals only talk about themselves and the products they’re selling) to two-dimensional (talking more generally about the industry and the competition) and three-dimensional (talking with knowledge and empathy about the customer’s specific needs and desires). The key to achievement, according to Henderson, is storytelling, which he views as foundational to building healthy relationships with clients and customers. His method breaks down telling stories into a five-part framework: setting the scene, presenting a challenge, describing a growth journey, facing fears, and providing a resolution. Pulling all of this together is a scene from The Wizard of Oz: “As Dorothy clicks her heels and wakes up changed forever in Kansas, she learns that everything she needed—mindset, heart, and courage—was already inside her.”
As the book proceeds, Henderson follows his own storytelling advice, writing with consistent energy, heart, and a good deal of unpredictability (his discussion of the elements of storytelling, for instance, is illustrated with examples from the famous boy bands of the 1990s). He varies his narrative’s visual presentation, including graphics, illustrations, and numbered points, to change things up, and he throws in plenty of pop-culture references, at one point comparing sales professionals to Jedi knights. He can occasionally lapse into truisms, such as “Results don’t come from intensity—they come from consistency” or “Stop making excuses and start finding solutions.” But his emphasis on relating stories is heartfelt and compelling. Simply knowing one’s products or services isn’t enough, he tells readers; what’s needed is greater connection, combined with lively presence. Henderson calls this notion “edutainment,” which he breaks down into such elements as empathy and ethics. (“Always operate with ethics and integrity,” he insists. “Don’t compromise your values for a sale.”) That said, Henderson insists that “nobody likes a slick salesman full of smoke and mirrors,” but he also provides point-by-point checklists that could certainly be used to simulate, rather than embody, sincerity. Fortunately, his own sincerity is abundantly evident; the book contains plenty of hard-won advice from the heart. Readers looking to up their sales game will find much that’s valuable in this work.
An energetic and unconventional program that valuably emphasizes telling one’s story.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781646872510
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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