A concise and engaging business manual for readers looking to improve leadership skills.
A debut guide for executives explores genuine leadership.
In this business book, Scott shares lessons learned in the course of a successful career running his own consulting firm. The work’s central thesis is executives must understand the difference between being a boss—an authority figure issuing orders and overseeing predetermined outcomes—and a leader (“Exponentially more powerful than authority because it involves choice”), a collaborative process resulting in maximum performance for all involved. The author writes about his own leadership failures as much as his triumphs, and does a good job of using them as teaching moments, providing a detailed portrait of how readers can learn from his mistakes. The manual’s advice includes tips for implementing active listening, creating effective communication, and enhancing leadership skills through journaling. The volume makes a compelling case for those practices to readers who might be inclined to dismiss them as too touchy-feely. (Scott is a high school dropout who served in the Navy before moving into the corporate world, and his personality is evident in an anecdote about his motorcycle and the occasional well-placed profanity.) His enthusiasm for meetings (“Meetings are where we lead!”) shows how frequent, face-to-face communication can be a valuable decision-making tool rather than a waste of time. The chapter on running meetings as a leader is particularly well done. The book’s pithy exhortations (“Define your snooze-button moment”; “Encouraging everyone on the team to be a leader is good for the team”) provide the audience with simple and concrete lessons throughout the text. Scott acknowledges in the opening pages that his view of leadership will not click with all readers (“Here’s what I want you to do: right now, leave this book on a bus or a train for someone that understands business is about people”). But for those who appreciate his tone, the work is a useful and thought-provoking guide to developing leaders at all levels of an organization.
A concise and engaging business manual for readers looking to improve leadership skills.Pub Date: April 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0224-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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