Inspiring guidance for making relationship-building outreach an ongoing life practice.
Organ shares his passion and strategies for seeking out informational interviews in this career/personal development guide.
“When I was trying to land a job out of college, I had zero connections. ZERO. I had to work my butt off to make them,” writes the author. He credits his strategy of pursuing informational interviews—he’s had over 100 so far—as “integral” to his career success, from landing his first corporate gig in football brand marketing at Nike to his current activities as a National Football League Players Association–certified agent and co-founder of the Disruptive Sports Agency. Organ outlines his methods for prepping, executing, and following through on these connection-building opportunities. He provides examples of effective initial outreach emails and discusses best practices to land a response. For the interview, he advises readers to take the lead and get interviewees talking with an “icebreaker” question, and he provides sample mid-interview questions designed for those early in their careers, those at mid-stage, budding entrepreneurs, and others at various stages of their work lives. The author details methods to continue to engage your targets (thank them within 24 hours of meeting; loop them into ongoing outreach as appropriate). The book includes end-of-chapter “Apply It” sections, including instructions to create your own version of the tracking sheet that Organ uses to capture, study, and capitalize on key outreach information. The author is a convincing, compelling advocate for informational interviews, using sports metaphors to refer to this tactics-filled book as “your coach” and his tracking system as “your version of watching film.” He offers a wealth of useful takeaways, including the importance of specific scheduling language (“Please give me three times that work for you over the course of the next week and I promise to make one of them work”). Best of all is Organ’s encouraging voice, urging readers to “Be a dog. Be a lion. Be a champion. You’re going to be great regardless because most people are scared to do any of this, period.”
Inspiring guidance for making relationship-building outreach an ongoing life practice.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781637556245
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2023
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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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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