A punchy and stimulating look at building brands.
A business book offers a methodology for companies to build trust in their potential customers.
“People don’t trust brands like they used to,” Bloomstein notes at the beginning of her work. “Failures of leadership, inconsistent messaging, and deceptive practices” in all areas of public life, from retail to “the halls of governments,” have combined to erode trust in marketed brands of all kinds. “Cynicism takes root,” the author writes, “when people don’t know who to trust and decide not to believe anything.” This is both a threat and a challenge for businesses wishing to build trust in their products and services, and Bloomstein seeks to provide clear and sharp advice for what customers want and what they respond to in the present age. “Users don’t shop for features, or fables,” she asserts. “They shop for benefits first,” for “What’s in it for me?” basics. “Focus on users’ needs,” she advises, “then you can help them focus on the features and details that will make a difference in their decisions.” In the course of her book, the author uses a variety of companies as examples of what to do and how to do it. Brand names like America’s Test Kitchen, GOV.UK, Airbnb, Banana Republic, MailChimp, and others are discussed, sometimes in the context of both Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the well-known business truism about “good, fast, or cheap”—everybody has to pick two out of the three. At the heart of Bloomstein’s outlook is the importance of simplicity in the flow of information. “Abstraction is different from generalizing,” she shrewdly points out, and “If information is power, it’s because confidence in our own knowledge fuels trust.” The author uses a very clear, lean prose line; marketing directors at all levels will find her insights intriguing, although her discussions of her various example companies can sometimes go too far into the weeds for effective generalizing. In this instance, readers may think of Bloomstein’s own comment that “ ‘More’ isn’t better. It’s exhausting.”
A punchy and stimulating look at building brands.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-989603-92-5
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Page Two Books
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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