An arresting and inviting colloquy on the qualities of real leadership.
A pair of executives from different generations explores the concept of leadership.
In their debut nonfiction collaboration, von Seldeneck and Alexander draw on their very different experiences in the world of executive recruitment. In the 1970s, von Seldeneck founded Diversified Search Group (DSG), which Alexander later joined, and the book alternates between exchanges of dialogue between the two and a shared narration of their evolving leadership ideas informed by their pasts. Von Seldeneck got a job as a typist in President John F. Kennedy’s Department of Commerce and lived through the turmoil of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement; Alexander was on active duty in the United States Army during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and entered a very different corporate world than that of her co-writer, one in which many glass ceilings for women had already been shattered. “If our stories prove anything,” they write, “it’s that there is no single right way to lead,” and yet the two authors agree on many commonalities of good leadership. “If you don’t leverage your position and power to do the maximum amount of good for the maximum number of people,” they write, “you’re ignoring one of your greatest assets – and a crucial component of true leadership.” Belying the fact that the book is a collaboration, the uniform tone throughout is very convincing. The sense of listening to two friends and colleagues hashing over the lessons of their lives is both vivid and enormously instructive. The give-and-take feels natural: “You used your power position to help me out, and I trusted you right away because of it,” says Alexander. “That’s a win for me, then,” von Seldeneck responds. Their shared leadership principles are wonderfully human: “Leaders shouldn’t be gatekeepers,” they write, “we should be gate openers.” Readers will want much more of this dialogue.
An arresting and inviting colloquy on the qualities of real leadership.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798891382923
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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