An eye-opening, even-keeled theory offering hope to those who disagree.
A business management expert explains that disagreements and conflicts are not the products of good versus evil but of differences in how individuals prioritize what he calls the Eight Great Goods.
After conducting thousands of interviews and surveys with people from more than 20 cultures, Beck (co-author: Japan’s Business Renaissance, 2005, etc.) determined that making decisions is, for most people, an attempt to do the right thing or to do good. The decisions people make, Beck says, can be sorted into one of the Eight Great Goods, each illustrated here with interview snippets: Life, Growth, Relationships, Joy, Individuality, Stability, Equality and Belief. Individuals prioritize these goods differently, with great variation; Beck notes that, according to his research, less than 10 percent of a representative sample of Americans shares a pattern of priority with another person. Regardless of this individual variation, Beck cogently and effectively proposes that by using these eight goods to categorize even the most contentious debates, opponents will discover commonalities. Perhaps more importantly, opponents will stop viewing debated issues in terms of good versus evil and instead understand conflicts as a matter of good versus good. Once an individual organizes the eight goods according to his or her own priorities, Beck says decision-making can be accomplished by applying a simple algorithm to the problem at hand. At the organizational and national levels, where individual lists would, he presumes, vary significantly, problems are analyzed based on which goods are most applicable. Using the debate over Arizona’s immigration law as an example, Beck illustrates this process by bringing a contentious group of debaters closer to agreement by identifying the goods of Relationships, Equality, Stability and Individuality—the goods most affected by the law’s passage, he says. Further evidence of how these eight goods factor into decision-making is described in Section III, which examines various nations and the policies that reflect how different countries have prioritized these goods. The book concludes with a section on how leaders can put the Eight Great Goods into practice and develop better, more focused and successful organizations. Due to Beck’s conversational writing style, the concepts are made easy to understand without becoming too simplistic. Rather than offering a tired analysis of the current trend toward deep polarization, he offers plausible, practicable steps toward a solution that require little more than a fresh perspective and a willingness to try something new.
An eye-opening, even-keeled theory offering hope to those who disagree.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-0984749140
Page Count: 240
Publisher: North Star Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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