An insightful commentary on the work of a salesman that conveys homespun wisdom in colorful prose.
The art of selling—and much else in life—is all about relationships, according to this soulful business self-helper.
Steck, a former partner at Goldman Sachs investment bank, looks back on his career selling securities to extract lessons on cultivating long-term personal relationships with customers. These include the importance of face-to-face meetings, which convey far more engagement, rapport, and nuance than screen-mediated, emoji-strewn texts (or even Zoom calls). Empathy is a must for understanding a prospect’s perspective, the author asserts, and requires attentive listening. (Steck recommends taking careful notes with pen and notebook rather than laptop or smartphone so customers can see you are listening to them and not fiddling with an app.) Salespeople must be willing to take calculated risks and show some vulnerability, the author argues, starting with the ordeal of cold-calling and the agonizing likelihood of demoralizing rejection. (On the epic end of the risk-taking spectrum, one Goldman Sachs executive managed to pitch an aloof prospect by somehow booking the seat right next to him on a trans-Pacific flight.) Assiduous following-up with contacts is crucial to building the relationship and closing a sale, Steck contends; 80 percent of sales require an average of five follow-ups, yet 44 percent of salespeople give up after just one follow-up, he reports. Keeping an account requires persistent study of the client’s industry and needs—this enables salespeople to make creative suggestions on improving the business. Most of all, selling requires dogged commitment to the relationship; Steck spent time chatting and spit-balling ideas with one client with nothing to show for it…until, out of the blue, he decided to buy $200 million worth of securities.
This brief for business humanism stresses virtuous salesmanship that strives to understand people and treat them well. The author illustrates his argument with winsome anecdotes about passionate restaurateurs, inn-keepers, and other entrepreneurs, as well as his own adventures training quarter horses at his ranch. (Winning over clients, he suggests, is a lot like getting a skittish colt to accept a saddle blanket on his back for the first time.) Steck distills his pointers on building sales relationships into pithy aphorisms: “The goal of the first meeting should simply be to introduce yourself, learn more about the person in front of you, and get a second meeting.” There is, at times, a lyrical, almost spiritual quality to Steck’s writing when it pays homage to the sacredness of the ordinary: “I find a greater return, both in sales and my personal life, when I remember to be present and available to what is at hand—at a red light, in conversation with my server over the wine list, talking to a loved one, chatting with the man operating the garbage truck on my street, or checking out at the grocery store. These moments all have gifts to give, when I extend myself to give and receive them.” Contrary to the stock image of desperate men sweating bullets and cutting throats for a sale, Steck offers the reassuring possibility that salesmanship can be a path to human connectedness and fulfillment.
An insightful commentary on the work of a salesman that conveys homespun wisdom in colorful prose.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781639081578
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Fast Company Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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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