A wealth of expertise in a mixed-bag package.
Coaches set out the reasons for their achievements.
As a popular face of ESPN and a respected sports journalist, Smith, author of Never Settle, has the prestige and connections to line up interviews with 20 championship coaches, from Nick Saban to Doc Rivers. The author examines their methods to draw out the common factors and then apply the lessons to broad leadership challenges. He organizes the discussions around themes such as building trust, effective communication, delegation, and developing the right culture. Effective leadership often involves painful choices, and the right decisions might not be popular. See it through and wear the consequences, say the coaches; someone has to, and there is no place for excuses. The same is true with off-field crises, and it is often here where years of team character building pay off. Coaches must also apply ruthless self-evaluation, recognizing that what worked yesterday might not work today—and likely won’t work tomorrow. This can be a difficult process, especially for coaches who have built their success on a signature style. The comments of the coaches are interesting enough, but the problem is that Smith doesn’t balance their insights with sufficient analysis. At least 70% of the book is interview material, and there is a good amount of repetition, which makes the text feel like a collection of disparate pieces rather than a cohesive whole. Although Smith brackets each chapter with summaries, it’s unclear how the leadership lessons of the coaches could be transferred to other fields. He obviously put a great deal of time and energy into compiling the interviews, but this one is for hardcore sports fans. Other contributors include Roy Williams, Kim Mulkey, Frank Beamer, John Calipari, Lane Kiffin, Nancy Lieberman, Mack Brown, Joe Gibbs, and Tom Izzo, and Tim Tebow provides the foreword.
A wealth of expertise in a mixed-bag package.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781538758380
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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
IN THE NEWS
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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