A sharp, habit-forming leadership manual.
A trenchant guide to coaching for business managers.
Books with clever titles and pithy, time-saving concepts fill the crowded management and leadership genre, which targets busy executives, and too often, they overpromise and underdeliver, like empty-calorie snacks. But Bungay Stanier (Great Work Provocations, 2013, etc.), the founder of Box of Crayons, a Toronto-based training company, has produced something closer to an engineered nutritional bar, in which each ingredient contributes to the whole. The author explains why coaching is vital for managers and reviews reasons why they shy away from it, including the notion that dispensing answers and advice seems faster and easier than empowering subordinates. He persuasively argues that changing such habits can free managers to “work less hard and have more impact.” The book refines the coaching process into “Seven Essential Questions” and gives each its own chapter: “The Kickstart Question,” “The Focus Question,” “The Strategic Question,” and so on. Each one asks readers to note a situation that triggers the urge to dispense wisdom rather than coach, and gives cues to replace that habit with a new one. The questions then build naturally toward conversations about coaching. The book tailors its organization and length to time-pressed readers, who can finish it easily in a couple of hours or in 15-minute increments. Bungay Stanier writes with verve, effectively incorporating humor, surprise, and parables. Subheads are numerous, and pull-quotes often fill entire pages, but readers shouldn’t mistake the book’s compact size, slide-deck–style presentation format, and breezy tone for a lack of substance. It’s packed with actionable tips derived from training classes; on-point observations from leading business thinkers, such as Daniel Pink and Charles Duhigg; supporting research citations; and recommended resources for further study. Each chapter steers readers to the Box of Crayons website, where lively videos will reinforce the messages. In this way, the book serves as either an appetizer for a whole course on coaching or as a satisfying small meal on its own.
A sharp, habit-forming leadership manual.Pub Date: Feb. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9784407-4-9
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Box of Crayons Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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