An inspiring business book about doing the right thing.
A blueprint for ethical behavior in a frequently unethical business world.
Shell, the chair of the Wharton School’s legal studies and business ethics department, firmly asserts that adopting a “conscience code” of ethical behavior in a corporate setting is not only morally right, but also more profitable than the alternative. According to the Ethics Resource Center, Shell writes, 40% of U.S. workers have witnessed unethical behavior on the job over the course of a year, but most of it goes unreported out of fear or unaddressed due to inertia or incompetence. The author interviewed several Wharton students about their encounters with such bad behavior, and he presents a great many examples in these pages. Readers will find many of these situations familiar, whether it’s a manager coercing employees to overlook something illegal or an entire team overstepping boundaries to hit a deadline. He also draws on the work of social psychologists in identifying a select group of pressures that can lead to bad decisions, which he calls the “PAIRS Pressures”; they involve one’s peers, the desire to obey authority, incentives (such as goals and deadlines), role expectations, and systemic pressure. He then explains 10 rules that readers can use as guidelines to combat these pressures, such as “Face the Conflict,” “Commit to Your Values,” and so on. The aptness of Shell’s many examples and consistent tone of wise encouragement will doubtless help many struggling readers find the courage to live by their convictions in the workplace. They’ll be further encouraged by Shell’s insistence that doing the right thing is advantageous not only philosophically, but also practically. Indeed, the advice here is designed to reorient readers away from ambition and coercion—the lures of the so-called “bad wolf”—and toward the ethical path, which, Shell stresses, is the successful one in the long term: “Authentic, lasting success in any profession demands adherence to the highest standards of integrity.”
An inspiring business book about doing the right thing.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-40-022113-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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