by Mark A. Herschberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2021
A valuable manual deftly shows that certain success skills can’t be learned in the classroom.
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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
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by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
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New York Times Bestseller
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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by Ezra Klein
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New York Times Bestseller
by Barry Diller ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 2025
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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