An invitingly readable and inspirational story about managerial change.
An instructive allegory about building better managerial skills.
Jessica, the fictional hero in this debut book by leadership coach Anastasopolous and author LaMarre, is a team leader in a bustling sales business, and even though she and her team are operating in “the blissful ignorance that comes from a growing market,” lately they feel like they’re making no progress, despite their hard work. The company’s leaders seem mired in outdated, ineffective strategies, and Jessica feels mired in her own malaise: She has a loving husband, a wonderful daughter, and a high-paying position, but she’s lost her passion for her job, which seems to be overwhelming her. Then she receives help from an unexpected source: a mysterious voice, apparently coming from a woman in an Edward Hopper painting, who offers disarmingly simple advice for how to turn things around. This counsel begins with something far simpler and more direct than anything Jessica has heard in the business world before: “If you expect your people to leave their humanity aside as soon as they enter the office, it’s going to tear them in two,” the voice tells her. “We’re all kids on a playground wanting to be loved, celebrated, and acknowledged.” Jessica begins to implement this new humanistic approach, with immediate positive results. As the story goes on to follow Jessica’s adventures with her new worldview, the authors very effectively personalize what might otherwise have been rather rote business motivational tips about being more empathetic toward one’s employees. It transforms Jessica into a fine example for any struggling middle-manager who might be looking to improve the way they approach their job. Along the way, it even presents readers with a few basic tenets of Stoicism: “We cannot control the way others react to the things we do and say,” Jessica is told. “We can only control the way we react to their reactions.”
An invitingly readable and inspirational story about managerial change.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-910976-6
Page Count: 186
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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