A persuasively argued guide for rescuing HR from itself and making it shine.
Alsop and Forbes’ business manual casts human resources as a potential driver of profit.
In this volume, two veteran HR executives say it straight out: In most companies, HR doesn’t really matter; CEOs and employees perceive HR teams as rule enforcers, bearers of bad news, and a necessary evil to sneak around, marginalize, or reluctantly satisfy. Alsop and Forbes trace this reputation to the field’s history and compounding bad habits. Their solution is what they call RelevantHR, which involves CEOs treating HR the way they treat the rest of the business, requiring the department to be relevant and create economic value. The authors move briskly from problem to solution—an early chapter dismantles six myths that keep HR workers stuck, like the beliefs that certifications make them good at their jobs and that they deserve a seat at the table without earning it. Their core argument lays out four essentials for making HR more relevant: aligning “people plans” to business strategies, offering insight and wisdom as trusted advisers to the CEO, stewarding real culture, and treating talent as the engine of growth. Later chapters introduce matrices for balancing employee satisfaction against results (“Every business has a gap between human performance and business performance”). The authors richly illustrate their points with statements from management gurus like Peter Drucker, the experiences of HR specialists like Dave Ulrich, and their own deep corporate backstories at Kraft, Capital One, United, Backcountry, and Ultradent. In doing so, Alsop and Forbes successfully show rather than just tell, providing real numbers and outcomes. The advice is practical and spiced up with a light skepticism toward HR conventions that feels earned rather than contrarian. CEOs will come away with a sharper sense of what to demand, and HR workers will gain a usable plan for selling their own value. One gap stands out: HR is a field staffed largely by women, yet the two successful male authors barely examine how gender might shape the perceptions they describe, or how to turn them around—though they do cite many women in the acknowledgments.
A persuasively argued guide for rescuing HR from itself and making it shine.Pub Date: May 22, 2026
ISBN: 9798901770030
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2026
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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