by J. Scott ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 2019
A concise and engaging business manual for readers looking to improve leadership skills.
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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
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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