A compelling argument for culture as the defining element of business success.
Becker’s guide to business culture draws lessons from elite military and police units.
In this debut business book, the author lays out nine crucial components of a successful corporate culture, arguing that a strong culture is the essential foundation for a profitable business. Becker, an entrepreneur and podcaster, combines stories from his role at the head of a tactical equipment company with insights from his interviews with other executives and leaders of military and law enforcement teams. He distills corporate culture into its essential elements, including hiring the right people, maintaining high standards, embracing criticism, and taking risks. Devoting one chapter to each of the nine pillars he identifies, the author illustrates the concepts with stories from tactical law enforcement units, elite military squads, and companies like Pixar, Microsoft, and Amazon. The stories often bring readers into the action as Becker describes hostage situations, terrorist attacks, and military assaults in which teams make split-second decisions enabled by the cultures they have developed. The author makes a solid case for applying the lessons of military and law enforcement to teams who face far fewer life-and-death decisions, though readers outside those fields may not share his enthusiasm for their intense training methods. The author displays a welcome humility as he discusses what he’s learned from his own mistakes as an executive and demonstrates the characteristics that he encourages readers to develop. The text is highly readable—Becker writes in an engagingly conversational style that keeps the pages turning while also making points effectively (“This approach is like throwing away all the sharp knives in your kitchen to avoid injuring yourself”) and highlighting action items and key takeaways. The book has occasional missteps, particularly the inclusion of Pixar as an exemplar without reference to the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment. On the whole, however, the book is full of pithy insights, actionable recommendations, and solid arguments for reimagining corporate culture in both large and small ways.
A compelling argument for culture as the defining element of business success.Pub Date: March 26, 2026
ISBN: 9798994345412
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Lessons Learned Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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
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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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