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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
