A solid and insightful guide to succeeding as a woman in business.
A veteran coach offers guidance to women in corporate roles.
In this debut business book, Snee draws on her doctoral research in psychology, her work as the founder and principal of a woman-focused consulting firm, and her years on the staff of a large corporation—in addition to her 18 years as a Roman Catholic nun—to provide advice to women who aspire to professional leadership roles. The volume takes readers through the process of understanding their own interests, motivations, and abilities; addresses specific skills like resilience and financial literacy that are crucial for leaders; advises readers to develop and strengthen strategic relationships within their organizations, throughout their broader networks, and with female subordinates; and explores what the concept of “executive presence” means when the executive is a woman. The narrative is a blend of general observations, insights from Snee’s personal and professional experiences—a lengthy digression into what her research revealed about women and speech patterns is particularly intriguing—and anecdotes from many of the women she has advised. These clients learned to claim responsibility for their own accomplishments, oversee projects that are relevant to their balance sheets, and communicate effectively at all levels. Each chapter ends with a summary of key points and a list of action items, both for self-reflecting and for implementing the book's advice in the workplace (“Pay attention when your inner-critic voice appears, and process it in writing after the fact”).
Snee writes that women need a “cheering section” to remind them of their accomplishments and push them into new and challenging roles. Through this book, she serves as a cheering section for readers, explaining how women can take ownership of their interactions and career trajectories and achieve their goals while emphasizing the work they need to do to reach them. The volume is wide-ranging despite its brevity and does an excellent job of explaining concepts without belaboring them. The writing is solid, and the narrative is cohesive. The author’s experience with a religious vocation gives her a unique perspective (for instance, her guidance on self-awareness is shaped by her training in St. Ignatius Loyola’s practice of discernment), but her overall approach is secular. While the general thrust of the book is similar to many other works on women’s leadership, Snee’s insights into minor but significant topics like word choice and hierarchical relationships distinguish the volume from its peers. The manual is strengthened by the author’s acknowledgement of its limitations. She notes in the introduction that as a White woman whose clients are mostly White, her knowledge of the particular challenges women of color face in pursuing leadership roles is more theoretical than practical. Still, when she returns to the topic in detail toward the end of the volume, she is both thoughtful and informed on the subject. The book focuses on women pursuing corporate careers, though most of Snee’s counsel is broadly applicable to other fields as well.
A solid and insightful guide to succeeding as a woman in business.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-742070-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2021
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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