Cohesive and impassioned; a bold, engaging path to effective leadership.
This debut manual/workbook focuses on self-directed leadership enrichment.
Some business leadership processes concentrate on organizational dependencies that could possibly impede personal development. Hardy’s methodology is decidedly different. She puts the responsibility for leadership squarely on an individual’s shoulders, suggesting that one must undergo a transformation by “engineering disruption in your life to become a better leader.” The approach is aptly named “crossing meridians” by the author, whose own development as a leader is emblematic. She rose from family poverty in the Mississippi city of Meridian to earn a law degree, hold senior positions at major insurance companies, and eventually form her own global consulting firm. This excellent work shows novice and experienced leaders alike how to chart a course through a deftly organized process of discovery, planning, and acting—with the ultimate goal of sustaining personal leadership excellence. The metaphorical use of meridians to represent both personal and organizational lines that must be crossed is very appropriate. It also serves to anchor the book around a strong, memorable concept that cleverly links the text to Hardy’s hometown of Meridian, a “symbolic origination point.” “Beginning Meridian” signifies a familiar, comfortable place from which any leadership journey starts. While it is easy to get too caught up in the volume’s “meridian” terminology, the approach is both logical and practical. During the author’s superb explanation of her self-improvement system, she recounts pertinent examples from her own life and cites several client illustrations to make the process come alive. A section on racial justice/workplace diversity is particularly timely and enlightening. Hardy stresses the importance of “empathy, openness, and resiliency” as “the bedrock—the ballast—of leadership.” She also highlights “leadership fluency” (the ability to “fluidly and continually navigate across divides” within organizations) as well as the need to build a distinct, personal “leadership brand.” Such concepts raise the content to a strategic level while the workbook integrated into the volume allows individuals to dive into the details and execute their own unique leadership development plans.
Cohesive and impassioned; a bold, engaging path to effective leadership.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66551-261-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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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