A useful guide for managers invested in creating better spaces for their workers.
A timely and thoughtful treatise on the value of mental health awareness in the business world.
At the beginning of this work, Pump, a chief financial officer for tech company Plank Ventures, details her own background, which included battles with drug addiction, and she connects her past with her core belief that there’s a stark dichotomy between healthy and toxic workplaces. She effectively points out that the latter is not only unhealthy for employees, but also hurts a company’s bottom line. Her opening chapters tackle insecurity, particularly workplace insecurity, which she defines broadly: “a feeling of danger or vulnerability—a feeling that our mental or physical state is at risk. This feeling may be rooted in a lack of confidence in our abilities, uncertainty about our future, or the perception of threats in our environment.” This is followed by practical and specific advice for leaders and managers on creating a healthier workplace environment; for example, she notes that an employee’s struggles with procrastination could simply be indicative of their discomfort with a task or a project’s demands, which a manager can address. From there, she moves into chapters on toxicity and strategies for creating safe psychological spaces; for instance, she points out that perks, such as an employee game room, may obscure the fact that the company believes in an aggressive workplace atmosphere. From the start of this work, Pump openly acknowledges that she’s not an expert on mental health, but she’s largely successful in showing ways in which leaders can create environments that feel safer for everyone in an organization. Most helpful is Pump’s ability to weave in relevant anecdotes that involve people in positions of power as well as their employees and their difficulties. She also offers clear directions in sections titled “Why This Matters to You,” which keep the work grounded in helpful pragmatism.
A useful guide for managers invested in creating better spaces for their workers.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2423-8
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 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
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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