An intriguing, if sometimes uneven, look at an important topic, told with confidence and occasional humor.
Taaffe blends research, professional expertise, and personal experience in a concise examination of women’s self-doubt in the workplace.
The author, a member of the faculty at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, discusses how gender stereotypes affect women’s confidence. She outlines the characteristics of what she calls the “Inner Antagonist,” and how this voice feeds into imposter syndrome. She divides her analysis into three parts. In Part One, she discusses how societal dictates affect how women are viewed and view themselves in a corporate environment. Part Two outlines how women need to relearn success strategies; Taaffe mentions how five strategies—“Preparing to Perfection,” “Eagerly Pleasing,” “Fitting the Mold,” “Working Pedal to the Metal,” and “Performing Patiently”—are each perilous in their own ways, and how any one of them can sideline women, rather than help them excel. Part Three brings the previous sections together to forge a new path—what the author calls stepping “through the mirrored door” by embracing courage and nurturing one’s network. The conclusion gives specific examples in the author’s own career—including an amusing reference to Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!—that reinforce her messages while encouraging readers to seek out other, diverse voices at every opportunity. The sources for the author’s research are collected into a notes section in the back, not cited in-text. The inclusion of “Key Takeaways” and “Journal Prompts” helpfully offers readers an interactive way to understand the text’s concepts. A mention at the beginning notes the language in this book conforms to a gender binary, due to the lack of inclusivity in the research she draws upon: “many observations are drawn from studies done without regard to intersectionality or gender fluidity.” Readers may wish that the author addressed this statistical reality with more of her own theoretical musings. Though the author repeatedly mentions the disparities between white women and women of color in corporate settings, she gives no suggestions or calls to action to address them.
An intriguing, if sometimes uneven, look at an important topic, told with confidence and occasional humor.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1774583296
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2023
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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