Well-crafted and heartfelt management tips; a dose of humanity particularly appropriate for driven entrepreneurs.
A debut guide offers management advice from a successful small-business owner.
This short yet substantive book presents a compelling case for focusing on company culture rather than monetary compensation. Botma, who built and runs a financial brokerage firm, writes passionately about his belief that employee motivation is based not on the size of the paycheck but on three fundamentals: freedom, affirmation, and purpose. He begins by discussing the “mindset shift” he went through when a valued employee resigned. By evaluating the loss, he realized “I hadn’t formally created a purpose, defined it, and woven it into my business.” The remainder of the manual dissects the three fundamentals; each is covered in a chapter with relevant examples and a few select references to other sources. At the end of each chapter, the author includes “Rebuttal,” in which he anticipates and addresses objections (a nice technique to quell uncertainty about adopting his ideas); “Key Takeaways,” a bulleted summary of the section’s content; and “My Intentional Actions,” blank lines to be filled in by readers. The text is largely based on Botma’s experience managing his own business, but he also uses the lessons he learned to counsel others. For example, he demonstrates ways in which he enabled employee freedom, such as taking his staff to a spring training major league baseball game on a workday. (The author’s company is located in Arizona, where some teams hold spring training.) Botma was confident his employees would get their work done despite the outing. He concludes: “When you don’t trust your employees, you are stuck either doing everything yourself or micromanaging everyone around you.” In writing about affirmations, the author wisely distinguishes between positive and negative messages conveyed by management, offering a useful nine-step implementation process. He writes that using affirmations correctly can change an employee’s attitude “from confidence killer to killer confidence.” Perhaps most important, Botma asserts, is providing employees with a “unified purpose” for their efforts. (Purpose is an important theme in the powerful book.) The final chapter neatly ties the three fundamentals together.
Well-crafted and heartfelt management tips; a dose of humanity particularly appropriate for driven entrepreneurs.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0543-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Lioncrest
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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