Though not a replacement for one-on-one financial guidance, this slim and accessible volume is filled with good advice for...
Being smart with medicine doesn’t make you smart with money. There’s help in this guide for successful physicians who haven’t planned for their financial futures as wisely as they could have.
Financial advisers Burd and Hemphill follow up on Pay Yourself First (2013), in which they advised young doctors how to begin their careers on strong financial footing. Such advice came too late for those already established in their careers, not to mention their spending and investment habits. Case in point is the fictionalized couple who regard themselves as rich but in fact have less than they need to survive a year without their high doctors’ salaries. “Could we design a program as systematic and data-driven as that in our first book,” Hemphill asks, “to provide that peak-career physician couple with confidence they can change their financial outcomes?” It sounds like a First World problem, and it is—earning such a high income that the downsides of irresponsible spending and vanity investments can be invisible over the course of an entire career. Regardless, the financial advice here is sound, sensible and roundly applicable to individuals from a variety of professions and with a range of incomes. Maximize your pretax savings to your employee retirement plan, they advise. Dump the assets that cost more than they earn—the rental property for which you pay more on upkeep than you make in rent, the expensive car that depreciates in value every year and is far more than you need to get from Point A to Point B. Curb your consumption now to close the quality-of-life gap between your current lifestyle and your postretirement one. Less applicable to all readers, perhaps, is the talk of selling the boat, the vacation home and the speculative real estate, but it’s solid advice nevertheless—and the admonition may, in fact, keep some from heading down those slippery financial slopes to begin with. Burd and Hemphill are not only credentialed financial advisers, specializing in the medical field, but they are also solid writers, their soothing but rational voice both embodying and promoting clarity in the often perplexing world of personal finance.
Though not a replacement for one-on-one financial guidance, this slim and accessible volume is filled with good advice for professionals looking to get their finances back on track.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495201035
Page Count: 102
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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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
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