A readable and intriguing business book that draws parallels between the corporate and racing worlds.
Ramsey imports lessons learned on the racetrack to the corporate boardroom.
In his nonfiction debut, the author asserts that the lessons he’s learned while working in the business world are applicable to the world of professional track racing, and vice versa. Ramsey spent over 35 years as an analytics expert and data officer at companies like Samsung, GlaxoSmithKline, and IBM; in a startling pivot, he created a professional auto-racing team called Big Data in Action, which competed in various series. When the author moved to the racing world, he noticed striking parallels with his corporate experience, even though, as he admits, such a realization “sounds like something a marketing department would dream up after too many energy drinks.” In both worlds, the author observes, “the stakes were immediate, the feedback loops were tight, and the margin between victory and disaster was measured in tenths of a second.” Ramsey lays out five principles at the core of this confluence, starting with “Decompose Your Key Metrics Like a Driver Decomposes a Turn” (find the one component with the most variance and make it your team’s specific, measurable target) before moving on to “Predict and Monitor Your Key Resources, Not Just Your Outcomes” (the author notes that most companies he’s worked with are good at predicting outcomes, but very few monitor the resources that produce those outcomes). Ramsey follows this material with “Expand the Use of External Data for Tactical and Strategic Decisions” (per the author, if your intelligence comes from the same sources as your competition, you have no advantage) and the self-explanatory “Find Unique Data Sources That Your Competitors Have Not Discovered,” concluding with “Find New Ways To Compare Using Historical Data” (“the richest insights in historical data are often hiding not in what everyone measures, but in what nobody measures”).
Ramsey, appropriately, keeps his text lively and brisk, breaking up the chapters visually with insets and bullet points, adding eye-catching “pit board” breakdowns. (“Formula 1 shows how tiny advantages compound,” reads one such entry. “Winning is not magic; it is the relentless pursuit of small gains across every system.”) He also provides quick “Boardroom Translation” sections: “A racing team does not just measure cornering speed—they measure the gap between the corner exit and the moment the driver gets back on the throttle.” The author occasionally lapses into typical business-book cliches like “History won’t repeat exactly, but it rhymes,” but generally his insights, while at times reading as a bit fanciful, are forceful and ultimately convincing about the importance of fast, firm decision-making. Ramsey does a skillful job of interweaving his own experiences on the racetrack, which lends his narrative more excitement than corporate guidebooks tend to have: “The restart came. Green flag. I got on the throttle and tried to hold my line, knowing exactly what was about to happen.” His business-world readers will find sound lessons in these pages about the imperative of quick, decisive action in the modern data-saturated world, and surely many of them will appreciate the dramatic framing.
A readable and intriguing business book that draws parallels between the corporate and racing worlds.Pub Date: July 1, 2026
ISBN: 9798995305309
Page Count: 201
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 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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