A human and congenially radical handbook for leaders seeking to prioritize intelligence, not hierarchy.
A behavioral scientist distills modern research on leadership into a practical guide to designing teams that outperform individual talent.
Whether in the trenches, on the basketball court, or in the boardroom, the question is often posed: What makes a brilliant leader? Levy, best known for his series of “Influencers Dinners,” tackles this question by dismantling leadership’s most persistent myths, from the alpha fantasy, born of debunked wolf-pack studies, to the MBA doctrine that treats leadership as a credentialed science rather than a social one. The focus here isn’t on individual talent but on “team intelligence,” or “the skills, attitudes, and habits that help leaders and teams become smarter and more effective together” that leaders cultivate by focusing on how their teams think and collaborate. Looking at cases like evolutionary biologist William Muir’s “super chicken” experiment, the text demonstrates how letting so-called super-talents and star players run amok creates more anarchy than value. Effective leaders, per the author, design conditions in which teams made up of both all-stars and supporting players work intelligently together to raise collective performance. Central to this approach are the text’s three pillars of team intelligence: reasoning, attention, and resource management. Levy writes with a humor and self-awareness rarely found in leadership tomes, evincing a self-effacing quality that never undercuts his arguments. The goodwill this earns can’t be overstated, as the text takes aim at some fundamental assumptions about leadership and is bound to ruffle feathers. The pacing is brisk and the research is thorough, drawing from credible studies and referencing well documented successes. (Among these real-world examples are LEGO’s reinvention of its creative process, Google’s experiments with team structure, and Pixar’s collaborative story-room model.) Each chapter concludes with an “Ideas in Action” section that revisits core ideas and ties them to actual practices. Though the book is focused on corporate leadership, there’s much here to apply to any team-based setting. In a genre known for recycling inspiration, this business book actually breaks new ground.
A human and congenially radical handbook for leaders seeking to prioritize intelligence, not hierarchy.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063399570
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2025
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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