Familiar but practical business management wisdom, presented in a format that’s easily digestible.
Simkins offers tangible business leadership advice that draws on the experience of coaching sports.
The author, an executive adviser, delves into familiar terrain in this book, which brings lessons from the playing field to the corporate boardroom. Simkins tells of once training for a bodybuilding competition, and she brings insights from athletic activities into her notions on leading a company. The juxtaposition of athletic team building and business management is a common trope, but what makes Simkins’ analysis of the subject notable is in how she backs it up with recent, cited research on neuroscience and performance psychology. She presents a vast spectrum of data related to these fields, although the material does result in some familiar conclusions. Commonplace discussions of industry disruption and workplace culture figure prominently, and mentions of artificial intelligence are sprinkled in as well—particularly addressing the need for companies to change to take advantage of evolving technological developments. The “Athleadership” model of management is built around four pillars, all of which rely on athletic terminology. The first, called the “MVP Foundation,” focuses on one’s mission, vision, and purpose in the cultivation of a distinct corporate identity. The second pillar presents the “Core 4” traits of resilience, agility, alignment, and well-being, which help business leaders persevere in the face of challenges and uncertainty, per the author. The third pillar is the “Conditioning Process”—essentially, learning through repetition, in keeping with new findings on brain functionality, cited by the author. Fourth is the “90-Day Way,” a quarterly assessment of the corporate game plan. Rather than focusing on hours, Simkins recommends that corporate leaders prioritize task-oriented work (or “purpose-aligned performance,” in her words) instead of increasing work hours. She cites this approach as a way to combat workplace burnout, which, according to cited research, two-thirds of American workers experienced in 2025.
The author presents her approach as a new way of running an entrepreneurial firm, but the book offers a lot of old-fashioned but solid leadership advice. By getting back to some basic business-building concepts, Simkins makes good use of her own experiences and uses contemporary research to argue on behalf of such concepts as clarity of concept, pluck, and personal reflection. Nothing in this book is groundbreaking, but Simkins does offer plenty of tangible advice in her examples, which business leaders are likely to find useful. The accessible sporting framework that Simkins adopts also makes this book a good general introduction to the genre of business leadership books for newcomers. It may not be a defining work, but it’s sure to serve as a fine starting point for entrepreneurs looking to build a clear vision for their businesses. At times, the book is a bit repetitive, but that’s forgivable in books of this nature, which often focus on hammering concepts home. Simkins includes a concise glossary to further reinforce the four pillars and other ideas in these pages, which will be particularly helpful for novices.
Familiar but practical business management wisdom, presented in a format that’s easily digestible.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781646872503
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2026
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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IN THE NEWS
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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