A likable and engagingly presented program for simplifying approaches to life.
A wide-ranging guide focuses on the basics of business and life.
A great number of business-oriented self-help books, Contento notes at the beginning of his own work, tend to aim advice at the small percentage of managers who have already figured out the fundamentals of corporate culture and advancement. He intends his own manual to address the great majority of people who perhaps haven’t grasped quite so much. His guide, he contends, is not only for managers who have become indifferent or burned out, but also for the unemployed adolescent dreaming of success and the recent business graduate looking for a job. The precepts he lays out for such readers are the opposite of the multilayered complexity that’s common in other business motivation books—he believes that the key to success in business and life is to “deliver simplicity.” He proceeds to apply this basic idea to many different practical aspects of working life, always keeping things very direct and straightforward. “Success is positive; failure is negative. Simplicity is positive; complexity is negative,” he writes in one such passage. “Your job is to be positive and to deliver simplicity. By telling your boss you ‘can’t’ do something, you’re introducing complexity into her life.” He gives in-depth coverage to subjects that many of his readers may mistakenly consider obvious or self-evident, things like productivity, mentoring, networking, and punctuality. Contento is a very engaging writer, and he rounds off each of his fast-paced chapters with convenient summaries. His decision to stir in ample stories from his own experiences adds a palpable sense of unguarded authenticity to what are, after all, reductively simple observations about personal responsibility. Readers need not be planning careers as entrepreneurs to find a great many worthwhile reminders in these pages.
A likable and engagingly presented program for simplifying approaches to life.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-228-84216-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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