An informative and useful look at different types of leadership experiences.
A debut business book offers an academic assessment of how leaders approach their roles.
This work explores leadership by defining the paths people take to their positions of authority. Clark and Persily divide leaders into six broad categories, which they call “Insider, Outsider, Representative, Proxy, Creator, and Legacy,” based on dozens of interviews with executives of businesses and government institutions. Insiders, for instance, are promoted from within an establishment while Creators start new organizations. The book discusses themes, like credibility, resources, and expertise, that are experienced differently across the six categories. The authors then examine each category in its own chapter, addressing the unique challenges and opportunities each type tends to experience. The meat of the volume is the substantial excerpts from Clark and Persily's interviews with the executives, which are used as specific illustrations of the general trends, recommendations, and conclusions of the research. Most of the executives are identified by name and organization, not anonymized, adding to the book’s authority as it demonstrates the characteristics shared by leaders across roles and industries. The interviews with elected and appointed officials are particularly intriguing, allowing the volume’s theory of leadership to extend beyond the C-suite. Unlike many books on business and organizational leadership, this one wouldn’t fit naturally in a self-help section. The volume follows an academic structure, with figures and subsections identified by number, and the tone is one of observation rather than cheerleading (“Michael Waldron discusses situations, noted through his work as outside legal counsel, where the outside hire must demonstrate sensitivity in building support and implementing changes that he or she was brought into enact”). Although it avoids the you-can-do-it approach of more commercial works in the genre, this book is filled with recommendations for actions, strategies, and approaches that readers can apply to their own circumstances, both in the main text and in an appendix and companion website. Clark and Persily make a solid case in favor of their six categories and demonstrate the practical applicability of their theoretical approach.
An informative and useful look at different types of leadership experiences.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-3-03-069016-8
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
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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These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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