While skewed toward the military and business world, this work delivers solid leadership insights.
In this guide, a group of successful individuals offer perspectives on leadership.
As a former quarterback for the United States Naval Academy’s football team, a naval officer, and a thriving entrepreneur, Stuvek epitomizes success. In this work, he moves “beyond inspiration” and the fluff delivered by many books in the self-help genre and instead focuses on “the nitty-gritty details of how to obtain the experience and skills that great leaders display.” Each of the manual’s 15 core chapters presents a first-person narrative written by a man or woman who has excelled in a field and who uses personal anecdotes to illuminate particular leadership traits. Given the author’s background, it is not surprising that many of the chapters are written by veterans whose leadership skills stand out given the life-and-death nature of their decisions, the military’s emphasis on teamwork, and their “ability to adapt and change as circumstances change.” Albert M. Calland III, who spent three decades as a Navy SEAL prior to his appointment as deputy director of the CIA, writes a particularly illuminating chapter that provides behind-the-scenes stories and lessons learned from the “war on terror.” Business and education figures are also well represented, including entrepreneur Jackie Freedman and former Arizona State University engineering professor Jacob Kashiwagi, who reminds readers that there is no single model of leadership. The book concludes with a chapter by Stuvek that supplies useful tips on how would-be leaders can motivate young people, whose upbringings may not resonate with the management styles of previous generations. Replete with intriguing success stories, useful acronyms, and practical tips, this is an uplifting yet pragmatic book. Though the volume is written in an apolitical style, some readers may be put off by its disproportionate emphasis on military and business leaders and its inclusion of several of President George W. Bush’s appointees and members of right-wing organizations like the Rumsfeld Foundation. Still, the guide’s contributors are diverse regarding gender and race.
While skewed toward the military and business world, this work delivers solid leadership insights.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73230-607-3
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Triumvirate Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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