A sensible, practical guide to understanding and using personal power.
A professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business considers power in the workplace and beyond.
Gruenfeld, a social psychologist, teaches a course that shares a title with her first book. Its premise is that trying out roles of either high or low status—e.g., in plays like David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross or Caryl Churchill's Top Girls—can help us understand our own complicated feelings about power. While the book doesn’t offer the exercises explored by the author's students, it does provide an in-depth examination of the ways we all, consciously or unconsciously, “play high or low” (terms that are more common in a theatrical setting) in our everyday life. Gruenfeld then provides useful ways to break out of our ruts. For the author, power is as much about connection as control, and it's morally neutral, capable of either good or evil effects depending on the players involved and their goals. Using examples drawn from politics, business, and personal life, Gruenfeld suggests ways in which power can be used for the greater good as well as techniques for avoiding becoming a victim of misused power. Perhaps her most original contribution is a chapter on the strategic value, at least on occasion, of “the art and science of playing power down.” As she writes, “like playing power up, playing it down is an act, designed to make us appear less intimidating, less capable of winning a fight, and less ruthless than we might actually be. But this doesn’t mean it isn’t truthful.” The author also offers ways to behave as a “supporting actor” and to avoid becoming a simple “bystander” when the balance of power needs to be shifted. Though the points Gruenfeld has to make don't easily stretch to book length, leading to a certain amount of repetition, she does articulate a reasonable analysis of power and how our understanding of it might be broadened.
A sensible, practical guide to understanding and using personal power.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-101-90395-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Currency
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Career and business advice for the hashtag generation. For all its self-absorption, this book doesn’t offer much reflection...
A Dumpster diver–turned-CEO details her rise to success and her business philosophy.
In this memoir/business book, Amoruso, CEO of the Internet clothing store Nasty Gal, offers advice to young women entrepreneurs who seek an alternative path to fame and fortune. Beginning with a lengthy discussion of her suburban childhood and rebellious teen years, the author describes her experiences living hand to mouth, hitchhiking, shoplifting and dropping out of school. Her life turned around when, bored at work one night, she decided to sell a few pieces of vintage clothing on eBay. Fast-forward seven years, and Amoruso was running a $100 million company with 350 employees. While her success is admirable, most of her advice is based on her own limited experiences and includes such hackneyed lines as, “When you accept yourself, it’s surprising how much other people will accept you, too.” At more than 200 pages, the book is overlong, and much of what the author discusses could be summarized in a few tweets. In fact, much of it probably has been: One of the most interesting sections in the book is her description of how she uses social media. Amoruso has a spiritual side, as well, and she describes her belief in “chaos magic” and “sigils,” a kind of wishful-thinking exercise involving abstract words. The book also includes sidebars featuring guest “girlbosses” (bloggers, Internet entrepreneurs) who share equally clichéd suggestions for business success. Some of the guidance Amoruso offers for interviews (don’t dress like you’re going to a nightclub), getting fired (don’t call anyone names) and finding your fashion style (be careful which trends you follow) will be helpful to her readers, including the sage advice, “You’re not special.”
Career and business advice for the hashtag generation. For all its self-absorption, this book doesn’t offer much reflection or insight.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16927-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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