An enthusiastic road map for taking work outside the office.
A management consultant advises companies to embrace remote work in this business book.
Razzetti, the author of Stretch Your Team (2018), counsels business executives on embracing a pandemic-driven shift toward doing work outside of an office setting: “Until recently, working from home was seen as the exception,” he notes. “Very soon, working from an office will be the exception.” If it’s done thoughtfully and deliberately, he argues, remote work can increase employee satisfaction and productivity while also strengthening corporate teams and a company as a whole. Razzetti explains how many of his clients, along with a growing number of business leaders around the world, have calculated that remote work is a net benefit and why many others will likely see the same results. The book addresses the mechanics of such work, with an emphasis on establishing frequent, asynchronous communication strategies that don’t require excessive real-time meetings, and then takes readers through a multistep process of developing a strong corporate culture when employees are working from a variety of locations. Razzetti offers advice on creating a robust knowledge base; avoiding meeting fatigue; giving feedback in a remote context; and building an environment of psychological safety in which employees can share ideas widely, make decisions effectively, and work efficiently. Each chapter concludes with a guided exercise intended to help readers understand how to make remote work compatible with their company’s needs. Razzetti is a remote-work partisan who understands that many in leadership are still unpersuaded, and the book successfully balances making a case to skeptics and giving practical advice to adherents, rendering it useful to a wide range of readers. (However, those who manage or work in location-dependent roles may feel frustrated by the book’s advocacy for a trend from which they’re excluded.) Plenty of specific examples—of companies that have succeeded at communicating across time zones, for example—allow the book to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
An enthusiastic road map for taking work outside the office.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9990973-8-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Liberationist
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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