A book of useful information for a changing employment landscape.
A businessman details the pluses and minuses of outsourcing.
Readers likely won’t be surprised at what Gallimore, a British entrepreneur and the creator of outsourcing marketplace Outsource Accelerator, has to say in this debut book, considering how many people’s work habits have shifted during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. However, they will be engaged by his treatise as a proponent of outsourcing—hiring talented, less-expensive workers globally and having them work remotely, rather than bringing an employee into the office—and says that it’s a strategy that’s growing more common. He notes that “we all increasingly shop for clothes, buy food, build friendships, find dates, book taxis, reminisce with old friends, and binge-watch our favorite shows” online, and that “it will soon be the place we all go to hire our employees.” His book offers a fine primer for many types of small-business owners, defining what outsourcing is and whether it’s the right move for a particular company. He covers a great deal of subject matter on the subject, including how to develop a framework for outsourced workers, how to hire the right people from afar and give them appropriate job training, and how to build and manage an offshore workforce, specifically drawing on his considerable experience in the Philippines, where he’s lived since 2014. The book benefits greatly from Gallimore’s to-the-point writing style, presenting information that, in other hands, might have felt convoluted. For example, he cogently notes that offshoring relieves an employer of “most of the administrative work of compliance, payroll, HR, and the general complexities of employment. This allows you, the client, to focus more on operations, growth, and scaling your business.” The book is filled with useful tips, and Gallimore makes great use of lists and bullet points to make the information digestible, including “12 characteristics of a great client and successful student of outsourcing,” which many will find indispensable. If outsourcing will soon be the way of the world, as Gallimore predicts, this book may help many get through it successfully.
A book of useful information for a changing employment landscape.Pub Date: May 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73962-300-5
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Outsource Accelerator
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2022
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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