An upbeat, engaging guide to improving a work environment.
A legal entrepreneur makes a case for establishing a strong corporate culture.
In his debut business book, Farber, the CEO and chief legal officer of Pacific Workers’ Compensation Law Center, shares lessons he’s learned from founding and running a law firm that, after some trial and error, has developed a strong sense of purpose, high employee satisfaction, and low turnover. The book takes readers through aspects of mission, self-awareness, hiring, and compensation, offering key insights that can also be applied to businesses outside of the legal field. Farber describes his mistakes as well as his successes, showing how, for instance, the firm’s original hiring process led to a weak staff, but it gradually improved as he learned to match the right person to the right job and ensure that new employees embraced the company’s core values. The book is well organized, with each chapter dealing with a different aspect of corporate culture and presenting concrete examples of successes and failures. Farber does a good job of explaining the seeming contradiction at the heart of his own company’s culture, which involved developing an extensive list of procedures and standards while also providing employees with the autonomy to put them into practice. He also provides a coherent explanation of why lawyers, steeped in a hierarchical and adversarial system (“Our thick skin projects an image of strength that, at first glance, seems at odds with vulnerability”), often have difficulty embracing a more effective workplace structure. Farber is open about the many other books that have shaped his understanding of business culture, and he does a good job of synthesizing and sharing those volumes’ lessons. The writing is strong throughout, and Farber displays an enthusiasm that makes for an engaging narrative. His willingness to discuss how he learned from errors, and improved his company as a result, keeps the book from devolving into self-congratulation.
An upbeat, engaging guide to improving a work environment.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0587-9
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's...
A fresh, provocative analysis of the debate on education and employment.
Up-and-coming economist Moretti (Economics/Univ. of California, Berkeley) takes issue with the “[w]idespread misconception…that the problem of inequality in the United States is all about the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99 percent.” The most important aspect of inequality today, he writes, is the widening gap between the 45 million workers with college degrees and the 80 million without—a difference he claims affects every area of peoples' lives. The college-educated part of the population underpins the growth of America's economy of innovation in life sciences, information technology, media and other areas of globally leading research work. Moretti studies the relationship among geographic concentration, innovation and workplace education levels to identify the direct and indirect benefits. He shows that this clustering favors the promotion of self-feeding processes of growth, directly affecting wage levels, both in the innovative industries as well as the sectors that service them. Indirect benefits also accrue from knowledge and other spillovers, which accompany clustering in innovation hubs. Moretti presents research-based evidence supporting his view that the public and private economic benefits of education and research are such that increased federal subsidies would more than pay for themselves. The author fears the development of geographic segregation and Balkanization along education lines if these issues of long-term economic benefits are left inadequately addressed.
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's more profound problems.Pub Date: May 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-75011-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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