Familiar but useful advice on developing and leading sustainable, people-focused organizations.
Executive and leadership coach Bouchard describes a vision for workplace coaching and a distinct set of metrics for analyzing success.
The author asserts that traditional measurements, such as revenue and return on investment, don’t tell the whole story of a business, and she envisions corporate coaching as serving many different roles in an organization. She says that leaders can develop tailor-made metrics for growth, which can, in turn, positively contribute to employees’ work/life balance, team dynamics, and company-wide decision-making. Sometimes, leaders fear asking for coaching help out of fear of seeming needy or weak, so the author advocates creating “hidden metrics” to measure progress within their organizations. To that end, the author focuses on individualized instead of group coaching, believing that it allows people to share deeper and more personal goals. The resulting confidential measurements can then be used to measure subtle behavioral and emotional shifts within an organization. Effective corporate stewardship also requires its own related shift, she says, from task-driven strategy to relationship building. A relationship-based work culture can serve corporations well in times of management transition, she says, since it can aid new managers as they juxtapose unfamiliar tasks with broader planning: “Over time, you’ll be able to reorganize those on your squad so they can take more of your daily responsibilities, freeing you up to lead.” Bouchard then offers familiar leadership tropes on integrating a company’s vision and values into its everyday practices. The book tends toward the more emotional side of business-leadership literature, and, as such, it may not appeal to all readers. Bouchard also presents the development of metrics related to more subtle human behaviors as revolutionary, although this approach is in keeping with the common leadership ideas surrounding work/life balance and the language of workplace fulfillment. Still, the author refreshingly focuses on the value of expressing such ideas through one’s deeds, as well as one’s words. As such, this book belongs alongside similar works focused on building and valuing employee relationships.
Familiar but useful advice on developing and leading sustainable, people-focused organizations.Pub Date: April 13, 2026
ISBN: 9798993123707
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Bouchard Executive Coaching
Review Posted Online: June 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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