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
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
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A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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