A well-crafted instructional tale that explores gender in corporate America.
An aging CEO tries to stem the flow of female talent away from her California company in this novel.
Debra is the co-founder and CEO of a Santa Monica–based tech firm. Sales are down, and people are jumping ship, including her star CPO, Natalie. Debra knows how hard the business world can be for women, but at age 60, she’s afraid she may be losing touch: “Debra had been feeling for some time that there was a generational gap; that she didn’t understand the concerns raised by some of the rising senior women….Natalie was the fourth senior woman in the past year to depart. The other three had also been on the younger side of the leadership team.” It’s especially frustrating for Debra because she’s worked so hard to promote women to leadership positions. Things don’t improve when Debra passes over Natalie’s preferred successor, Amber, senior director of product development, to bring in a man from the outside. Sales continue to fall. Debra can sense a crisis brewing, but she doesn’t know how to stop it. There is more holding back the young women around her than a simple lack of confidence—more than can just be solved by “leaning in.” To figure out how to save the company, Debra will have to listen to the young women still around: people like the frustrated Amber, who is secretly scheduling interviews; Debra’s new mentee, Cassandra, with whom she’s struggling to click; and even Kyle, a younger male manager who sees the flaws of many of his male colleagues. But can an old dog like Debra learn new tricks, even ones she wants to learn? Can she turn around her company before her investors rebel? Written with the express purpose of dramatizing the issues that many companies face concerning female engagement and leadership representation, the book attempts to get at the problems that persist despite the fact that everyone seems to want to solve them.
Ho’s prose is subtle and taut, as here, where she describes a tense work lunch: “Amber’s hands were beneath the table, but she was studying the menu as if it were the most riveting laminated sheet in the world. Her eyes were currently fixed on the meats page, even though she was a vegetarian. Sometimes Debra wished it didn’t always fall on her to break the ice in uncomfortable situations.” The story isn’t so compelling that it would satisfy readers with no interest in restructuring a corporate work environment, but it is much better than it has to be. For a novel with such overtly didactic purposes, the interpersonal dramas are well drawn and compelling. The author captures the way that colleagues interact: invariably polite on the surface while simmering underneath. What’s more, it makes Ho’s points in a way that a normal, prescriptive work of nonfiction could not. The characters easily embody the various perspectives, and they help readers see the situation from outside the blinkered viewpoint of a CEO. The result is an engaging evolution of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” mantra.
A well-crafted instructional tale that explores gender in corporate America.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-95-410600-0
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Strategic Imagination
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
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
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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