An energetically delivered approach to revamping business leadership.
DeShields presents a multi-step process for revitalizing corporate leadership principles in this business guide.
Business books typically place a great deal of emphasis on the importance of people in making an organization successful; that starts with leadership, observes the author (a corporate consultant) in her nonfiction debut, but she stresses that things often aren’t so straightforward. “Our limited attention spans and needs for immediate gratification push us to simplify, simplify, simplify,” she writes. “But leadership is not simple.” In her view, while prioritizing leadership is the key to enduring growth, the concept of leadership itself needs to return to its roots as a process rather than a destination (she draws a distinction between real leaders and what she calls “bottom-line executives”). To address what she refers to as the “leadership crisis,” DeShields has devised a “Leader-First approach,” built around nine “leader touchstones”: emotional intelligence, courage, curiosity, integrity, authenticity, empathy, inclusivity, gratitude, and resilience, with the most important of these being the first (“When you develop EI,” she writes, “you become more adept at recognizing and understanding your emotions and those of others”). Each of the book’s chapters includes “Leader-First stories” to illustrate its points, as well as inset “Key Definition” boxes for handy reference. Readers already familiar with trends in corporate leadership (which sometimes seem to position CEOs and COOs as quasi-life coaches and cult leaders) will recognize many of the author’s concepts, all of which are clearly and enthusiastically presented. DeShields’ focus on building corporate culture, which she identifies as the most important growth strategy leaders should adopt to play “the long game,” may strike some readers as off-putting (some people just want to work at a company, not join a collective), but the call for greater intentionality in leadership is welcome.
An energetically delivered approach to revamping business leadership.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9798988514114
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Leader-First Publications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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