Accessible, compassionate business and life advice from a prominent queer corporate leader.
A veteran executive shares the formative events that shaped his successful business career.
Through an effective combination of anecdotes, personal history, and memories, Fielding, born in 1965 in Toledo, Ohio, reflects on his life and exemplary career achievements. The author’s mother was an alcoholic, and despite his father becoming detached from the situation, both parents instilled in their son the importance of hard work. From his early youth, Fielding recalls acknowledging his homosexual identity, but he resisted embracing it, considering surgery to deepen his voice and even suicide. “I prayed for change,” he writes, and “shoved my feelings down.” Eventually, however, he accepted himself as a “complicated unicorn” and went on to overachieve in school to prove he was just as good as his straight peers. A self-described “Type-A, compulsive, and overzealous control freak,” the author launched his retail career with a post-collegiate department store stint followed by positions at Gap, Inc. in San Francisco. “For a little gay boy from Toledo, San Francisco was Disneyland or Oz,” he writes. “It only existed in dreams and movies.” He continued on to upper management jobs at Lands’ End, Disney, Claire’s, and Dreamworks, where he was global head of consumer products and further developed a leadership philosophy fostering curiosity, learning skills, and, above all, acceptance of the changing realities of the corporate landscape. Employing a sincere, affable tone, Fielding addresses many issues involving social justice, and he never masks his increasing frustration with the politicization of the queer community’s struggle. He also shares an emotional segment about caring for his mother as she dealt with early stage dementia. Throughout this encouraging book, Fielding inspires leaders of all sizes and colors to embrace diversity, build community, and use intuition to fight against social injustice and intolerance. The author is also realistic: “While some days are better than others, the fight is truly never over.”
Accessible, compassionate business and life advice from a prominent queer corporate leader.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781394165285
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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