A comprehensive, rigorous, and friendly guide to transforming organizations.
Bondareva, the founder and CEO of consultancy Vivit Worldwide, explores the many factors involved in leading organizations through transformative change.
This “trail guide for change-makers” focuses on fostering transformative change by increasing effectiveness, rather than pursuing incremental change by improving efficiency: “Incremental change fine-tunes the system while transformation recasts it, fundamentally changing the rules, structures, systems, skills, and processes.” She views this sort of change-making as a vocation that has lacked the definition and structure of an established professional discipline, and this book is intended to provide that framework, arguing for a process of “change design” that comes before and goes beyond the better-known work of change management. Using concrete examples from her personal experience, she breaks the process into six key stages: “Finding Your Purpose,” “Identifying the Idea,” “Vetting the Idea,” “Creating Change” (the most substantial section), “Getting Yourself Ready,” and “Exit.” Bondareva covers various modes of change-making (advocacy, supporting others, intrapreneurship, and entrepreneurship), 10 “megatrends” that offer opportunities for meaningful change (“In a world seemingly run by technology, we are hungry for solutions that honor our humanity and deliver more than a modicum of compassion,” she notes at one point), risk assessment, getting funding and support, implementation, and more. The author presents familiar concepts in fresh ways; for example, she defines risk assessment as confidence versus trepidation, and transformation as a current state versus a future state. She also provides useful exercises, strategies, and tips for everything from preparing financials and presentations to gauging impact and managing stress relief. In addition, Bondareva strongly emphasizes the importance of seeing other people’s points of view. Despite some repetition, the author’s style is clear and direct, using simple analogies, examples, and occasional charts and diagrams to explain potentially difficult concepts. Her passion for her subject is obvious as she frankly presents the challenges of trying to change the status quo while also encouraging readers to overcome such obstacles. The final section (“What Now?”) sums up the book’s main ideas and compiles several exercises into a “Change-Maker’s Checklist.”
A comprehensive, rigorous, and friendly guide to transforming organizations.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9798865487982
Page Count: 407
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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