If Charles Reich is your bag, then this may be your book. If you want your neuroscience qua science, then head over to where...
A head-spinning guide to supercharged meditation.
If life is like a box of chocolates, to quote the philosopher Forrest Gump, then, to quote Siegel (Clinical Psychiatry/UCLA; Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, 2016, etc.), “consciousness is like a container of water”—undrinkable if a tablespoon of salt is put into an espresso cup but just fine if the container is a bathtub. And why is it like a container of water? That’s never quite explained, except to say that cultivating the mind to maximize awareness makes our experience of things different. That heightened experience can be a deeply positive thing, for, as the author points out, neural integration makes problem solving easier, and “open awareness” boosts the immune system. Siegel delivers a “Wheel of Awareness” to visualize the process, with attention as the spoke, knowing or awareness as the hub, and “knowns” on the rim. But those knowns can be awareness-inhibiting prejudices as well as hard-won knowledge of how the world works. Siegel favors a murky, circular style: “When we open awareness to sensation, such as that of the breath, we become a conduit directing the flow of something into our awareness.” Well, yes, that’s how breath works, but Siegel means something different—“enabling the sensation of the breath at the nostrils to flow into consciousness.” Further along, the author complicates the picture: “And so both focal attention involving consciousness and nonfocal attention without consciousness involve an evaluative process that places meaning and significance on energy patterns and their informational value as they arise moment by moment.” Can there be meaning without consciousness? That’s a question for Heidegger, but suffice it to say that it’s a clear if empty statement relative to the main, which is laden with jargon, neologisms (“plane-dominant sweep”; “SOCK: sensation, observation, conceptualization, and knowing”), and lots of New Age cheerleading.
If Charles Reich is your bag, then this may be your book. If you want your neuroscience qua science, then head over to where Damasio and Dennett are shelved.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-99304-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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