A sometimes-repetitious but useful and forward-thinking guide.
A retail analytics expert shares techniques for turning store traffic into sales success.
Ryski posits that with so much choice and limited customer attention span, the presence of shoppers in a brick-and-mortar retail store is a gift to managers that needs to be monitored and converted into sales. The author also challenges the conventional belief that Amazon.com and online competitors are destroying such traditional retail, noting instead that physical stores are defeating themselves through their refusal to track traffic or implement the resulting data, as this can inform strategic decisions regarding staffing, marketing, customer service, and merchandising. The book’s central focus is on conversion of customer visits into sales, and the significant gap between traffic and transaction. The author’s research reveals the primary reasons that shoppers leave empty-handed: inability to find assistance, unwillingness to endure long checkout lines, and difficulty finding products. However, Ryski’s goal effectively extends beyond mere traffic analysis to helping retailers create appreciable shopping experiences through data-informed decision-making. He emphasizes the reduction of “shopper friction” that results in a customer leaving empty-handed, which includes understaffing and prevents conversion. Ryski also focuses on the need to understand individual store locations and the customers they serve, rather than relying on standard, corporate “inventory…‘packs’” that may not serve their needs. Over the course of this book, the author provides practical techniques and consistently maintains a sense of optimism about brick-and-mortar retail’s future. Although some of the book’s discussion around conversion can feel repetitive or circular, it ultimately reinforces the book’s core messages. Each chapter concludes with “Chapter Takeaways” and “Practitioner’s Advice” sections that summarize key points and offer guidance. While these recaps often revisit the same themes, the book as a whole is likely to resonate with many retailers.
A sometimes-repetitious but useful and forward-thinking guide.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798886453768
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2025
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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