A passionately focused, occasionally simplistic guide to a fresh approach to leadership.
Lembi sounds a call for a new kind of committed corporate team leadership in this nonfiction business book.
The author, a professional development coach, opens his book about “learn-it-alls” by immediately acknowledging that his readers will already be familiar with a related concept: As he wryly points out, know-it-alls aren’t in short supply in our world. “Whether through defensiveness, confidence, or disinterest,” he writes, “know-it-alls are set in their ways, have a fixed mindset, and are averse to change.” The dangers of this kind of fixed mindset are at the heart of Lembi’s advocacy for a new kind of leadership, since, as he asserts, adaptability is the key to survival; what he describes as the last three industrial revolutions all created more jobs than they eliminated—but they required change. This will be the case in a post-Covid world of automation and AI, the author posits, drawing on his long experience in corporate leadership to promote the core values of lifelong learning. His “learn-it-all leaders” go all-in. “They work with passion and intensity,” he writes. “They create a compelling vision and commit fully to it.” He urges his readers not to let their egos get in the way of staying nimble and accessible to new demands, provided the deeper commitments remain constant. “Switching gears is totally acceptable,” he writes, “when you have confidence in your larger vision.”
Effectively using concise and clear examples, Lembi consistently urges corporate managers to build the skill of empathy and to make a regular habit of getting out of their own headspaces to better understand their employees. He encourages them to extend their curiosity to encompass not just the technicalities of their field, but also the people carrying out the business. “Take an active interest in your team members and learn about their hobbies, families, and interests outside of work,” he writes. “Not only will this create a strong professional bond, it will help you better understand the needs and motivations of the people you need to motivate.” His advice insistently prioritizes the basics of personal interaction, which are repeated throughout the book. “There may be no better way to demonstrate what vision and goal-directed focus look like,” he writes; “Focus on what is being said. Be a good listener. After all, listening is how we learn.” This note is sounded regularly: Leaders should model the behaviors they want to see in their team members. These repeated reminders about such practices as refraining from scrolling on your phone while an employee is conferring with you and listening at least as much as you talk may strike some readers as overly reductive (do businesspeople in the 21st century really need a book to carefully spell out for them that they should be courteous and friendly to their paying customers?). But the author’s frequent references to his learning experiences at his own company help to compensate for this rudimentary, back-to-basics approach, and those references likewise thoroughly humanize Lembi himself, making him the kind of leadership coach readers will be happy to follow.
Pub Date: April 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781544541655
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2023
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
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
