Solid science backed by sensible action points—good airplane reading for business travelers.
If you want a raise, ask the boss in the morning—but never at 2:55 in the afternoon. The reason? Ask pop-science writer Pink (To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, 2012, etc.), who examines what happens when in daily life.
It’s a truism that timing is of the utmost importance. Mining veins familiar to readers of Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely, Pink delves into circadian rhythms, bimodal patterns, data clusters, and all the other stuff of popular business writing to explore, for instance, what a person’s optimal time of day is for such things as collegiality, productivity, happiness, and the like. The answer is that mornings are when good things happen, while afternoons are times of flagging energy, surliness, and negativity. Perhaps surprisingly, afternoon is also the time when ethical lapses are likeliest to occur, with some variation depending on one’s “chronotype.” Moving on, the author analyzes problems, addresses some of the latest research surrounding them, and then offers a few simple strategies for self-improvement, some a touch soft (join a yoga class), some more pointed—for instance, if you want to be perceived as an effective manager, answer colleagues’ email promptly, since “e-mail response time is the single best predictor of whether employees are satisfied with their boss.” Timing, similarly, can be a simple matter or a highly elaborate one, as with the food delivery workers who fan out across Mumbai each day, guided by the careful communication of information that “allows the walas to anticipate one another’s actions and move in harmony.” Pink also notes points at which our culture is inefficient in its accommodation of people who move to different rhythms: night owls tend to greater intelligence and creativity than early risers, but they’re forced to be “like left-handers in a right-handed world.”
Solid science backed by sensible action points—good airplane reading for business travelers.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1062-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Memories of 25 years on the couch make for a curiously compelling recounting of the rewards and shortcomings of psychoanalysis. Chernin (Crossing the Border, 1994, etc.), herself a psychoanalyst, dives into recollections of time spent with three analysts over a quarter of a century. Using traditional analytic tools—primarily association—she recalls to life the passionate young woman in Vienna who sought intellectual and sexual adventure; the fragmented, newly divorced young mother in California who found in her first analyst a target of devotion; the emerging adult who found a life's work and a credo of bisexuality with her second analyst, and the mature woman who broke with classical ``interpretive'' psychoanalysis through her third analyst. All of these rewarding if drawn-out probes are tracked by a shadow self that has ``descended, as if in a diving bell, to uncharted regions.'' It is not Chernin's theories, but her ability to lead the reader into that ``teeming, fecund inner world,'' which rarely surfaced in the analysts' offices, that make this book appealing. With the help of yet another analyst who monitors her clinical work, she comes to believe that analysis is not the science of mining the psyche, but the art of storytelling. The ``patient'' molds a unique story for the ``doctor'' to appreciate without fitting either the tale or the telling into an established framework. Whether about infants as bisexual beings or adults as their own best storytelling analysts, Chernin's sudden ``insights'' echo ideas that have been chewed over since Freud (and long before, if you count mythology). Still, she pleads for respect, citing those insights as hers for the moment, invested with the ``aha'' of personal discovery—like a child who finally understands that c-a-t is more than squiggly lines. Despite her angry critique of traditional psychoanalysis, Freud remains a hero and psychoanalysis has ``a lasting place among the major achievements of our culture.'' There are echos of Erica Jong in this book's naive self- absorption, but Chernin's hard-core fans will find it rich with discovery.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017118-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A brisk and thought-provoking anatomy of shopping in the 21st century.
A study of the fraught world of retail in the age of Amazon.
The latest from Wharton School professor Kahn (Marketing/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Global Power Brand, 2013, etc.) notes the sweeping chaos and disruption among American retailers. Dozens of such name-brand national businesses have either shut down outlets or shut down completely in recent years. She opens her account of this upheaval by identifying what she sees as seven key forces at work, including massive advertising data-collection; vertical integration in order to control all aspects of a brand; an excessive number of brick-and-mortar stores; a younger, less brand-loyal customer base; retail customers moving to cities, away from sprawling suburbs and shopping centers; and a general shift toward online shopping across multiple platforms. But the main focus here, which the author calls “the gorilla in the room,” is the online retailer Amazon.com, with its “fierce understanding of what customers want.” Amazon fills these wants with a seemingly unbeatable combination of basics, she says, including low prices, fast service, responsive returns, and all-inclusive convenience. The company’s model is a familiar one, she points out—it was used, for instance, by Walmart in the 1990s—but the amount of resources that Amazon has put behind it has caused other retailers, big and small, to scramble to adapt. Kahn studies strategies by successful businesses, such as cosmetics retailer Sephora and eyeglasses store Warby Parker, and she offers readers “the Kahn Retailing Success Matrix,” which looks at variances between different aspects of the retail process. Kahn lays this all out with a brevity and clarity that’s extremely effective. She also makes ample use of simple charts, designed to show the different quadrants of her Success Matrix—“Product Benefits,” overall “Customer Experience,” and the specific abilities to “Increase Pleasure” and “Eliminate Pain Points”—as they flow into and sharpen one another. At times, the tenor of the book seems willfully reductionist, as it likely takes more than faithful adherence to a successful matrix to give a small mom-and-pop bookstore, say, a chance against a corporate juggernaut. That said, modern retailers will find the book’s breakdowns of the essentials of retail helpful for widening their perspective and keeping the bigger picture in view. Particularly insightful are her examinations of “Generation Z,” the “digitally native millennials” whose relationship to traditional advertising and retail is very different from those of customers of the past. The author also treats the changing nature of brick-and-mortar buying-and-selling with pleasing nuance. Indeed, she makes a case for the necessity of a brick-and-mortar renaissance, and the urgency of creating “highly compelling in-store customer experiences” to make that happen. It’s also a canny move for Kahn to get into the nitty-gritty of how a handful of companies have maintained their success, as it provides a welcome counterweight to the book’s tendency toward extensive theorizing.
A brisk and thought-provoking anatomy of shopping in the 21st century.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61363-086-0
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Wharton Digital Press
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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