A valuable manual deftly shows that certain success skills can’t be learned in the classroom.
A multifaceted guide focuses on career considerations.
With experience developing learning tools at MIT and Harvard Business School, Herschberg uses this debut to impart his knowledge of the working world, highlighting critical “firm skills” he believes are rarely taught in educational institutions. The book, which the author likens to a “career success accelerator,” encompasses three areas: “Career,” “Leadership & Management,” and “Interpersonal Dynamics.” The “Career” section covers how to develop a career plan, how to work effectively in a company setting, and interviewing skills, both from the candidate’s and company’s perspectives. The first chapter is the most expansive in the volume; it offers a useful road map for a career plan with key questions to answer, a discussion of various options, and suggestions for developing the blueprint. The three examples Herschberg offers for a “Career Decision Tree” helpfully depict the kinds of preparation and experience needed to progress in certain fields. This chapter also addresses the value of collaborating with a mentor and the differences between working for a startup and a large corporation. “Working Effectively” is an insightful overview of the role of the individual in an organization; it includes valuable guidance for navigating departments, reading signals from company management, and comprehending corporate politics. “Interviewing” serves a dual purpose: This chapter gives the job candidate solid advice on how to interview for a position as well as actionable criteria for a team tasked with hiring a candidate. Here, the author provides a plethora of interview questions divided into such categories as “Values,” “Situational Questions,” and “Analysis.”
The book’s second part examines leadership and management skills, which are extensively covered in other guides. Still, Herschberg manages to deliver some new, engaging material. For example, he draws a perceptive distinction between “positional” and “influential” leadership, presents the intriguing “myth of the alpha male,” and sensitively calls attention to the “double bind” of the female leader: “The more a woman exhibits the traits often associated with being a good leader, such as being direct, confident, unemotional, and ambitious, the more she violates the societal expectations we have of a ‘good woman,’ meaning gentle, self-deprecating, emotional, and supportive.” The portion on being an effective manager is equally illuminating. The author emphasizes the manager’s four roles (“Strategist,” “Translator,” “Planner,” “Coach”), shares several intriguing theories about employee motivation, and provides a solid discussion of teamwork. The final part of the guide is perhaps the most meaningful; it addresses interacting with others, concentrating on communication, networking, negotiation, and ethics. In this section, Herschberg furnishes numerous beneficial and insightful tips. Concerning networking, for example, he supplies specific, useful examples of the wrong and right ways to network. The chapter on negotiation may be one of the most pertinent in the volume. Herschberg identifies stages and types of negotiations, again using excellent, relevant illustrations, and suggests how to deal with a job offer. A closing chapter on business and personal ethics is laudable.
A valuable manual deftly shows that certain success skills can’t be learned in the classroom.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-96-010074-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Cognosco Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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