A CEO-turned-professor’s debut business book advocates a leadership style for the social media age.
Many business books have been centered on animal motifs, from cats to dogs to sharks, chameleons and penguins. Arguably, the metaphor is overdone, but readers may want to make room for one more in the menagerie, as Glover’s (Accounting/Drexel Univ.) giraffe allegory holds up well. Unlike many business-book peers who hire ghostwriters, Glover openly shares authorship with Curry, whose writing credits range from documentary projects to short fiction. It’s fitting, as Glover’s message is all about increasing transparency, flattening hierarchies and replacing top-down management with true dialogue in order to achieve shared goals. Glover rose from humble beginnings—his great-grandmother was a slave; his father, a school janitor. Nurtured by parents and church members who emphasized education, hard work, humility and patience, he overcame racism and tradition to become CEO of an Atlanta PricewaterhouseCoopers subsidiary in 2000, and he later started his own consulting company, Rede, Inc. After a foreword by Bill Cosby, Glover explores, in six compact chapters, how technology and changing cultural norms have come to favor leadership traits reminiscent of the giraffe, a nonpredatory herbivore and gentle giant known for farsightedness. A giraffe also rises up after dramatically falling at birth, skillfully avoids lions while constantly moving forward to feed and peacefully interacts with diverse herds (an analogy for social media strategy). Glover assembles trends and transformational concepts that aren’t new—and, in fact, are well-sourced—but his book’s organization and presentation are entirely original. Some readers may find that his praise for multinational giants such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, PepsiCo and Wal-Mart lacks critical balance, but he doesn’t aim to comprehensively analyze any one company; he presents examples of the leadership style he favors. It works best when he uses anecdotes from his personal life and professional career, which he does often; he also draws from poetry, Scripture, music, sports and popular media to cast additional light on his argument and on his own life.
A serious business book with a light touch, a clear message and much wisdom.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479349227
Page Count: 134
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: BUSINESS | LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION | GENERAL BUSINESS
Did you like this book?
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Did you like this book?
SEEN & HEARD
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
Categories: BUSINESS | LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION | PSYCHOLOGY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
