An inspirational perspective on an unusual leadership style.
Bhalla (The Curse and the Cup, 2014, etc.), delivers a multilayered guide to “soulful leadership.”
The author, a self-described “globally recognized thinker-doer” who works as a consultant, speaker, and leadership coach, believes that people are living in a “VUCA” world: “Volatile,” “Uncertain,” “Complex,” and “Ambiguous.” The only way to navigate this new world is through soulful leadership, he says, which he defines as “a conscious desire to use power and resources to increase the well-being and prosperity of the greater many, not just the privileged few.” A soulful leader is the opposite of an egotistical leader, he notes, as the latter is identifiable by a tendency to disrupt and distract, an insistent need for rewards and recognition, poor listening skills, impatience, and an intolerance of dissent. In contrast, soulful leaders have substance, are authentic, and have a clear vision. “Soulful leaders are neither timid nor squeamish,” Bhalla says. They don’t exist in a bubble, however; they must extend their “orbit” to employees, customers, and to the planet. Bhalla illustrates the parameters of soulful leadership through fictional scenarios and real-life situations faced by leaders like Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela. Each essay also includes “Think About It,” “Talk About It,” and “Act on It” suggestions to put esoteric ideas into practice. Although Bhalla’s prose is precise, it can be textbook-dry; when discussing psychotherapist Alfred Adler’s theory on success, for example, he writes, “For him, success is a purely competitive concept, a fixation that robs moment-to-moment living of all joy, since living is deferred to some uncertain time in the future after the individual feels fulfilled by success.” The author’s approach to the theories’ applications, however, is more playful. For instance, the author intersperses poems among the essays, he says, because poetry taps into the soul “in a way that can’t be accomplished by merely appealing to the mind.” Regarding the Emily Dickinson poem “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” he writes about establishing an “ ‘I am a nobody’ culture in your own organization and workplace.” Forward-thinking organizations will find these concepts to be timely and useful.
An inspirational perspective on an unusual leadership style.Pub Date: July 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62865-421-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Motivational Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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