A lean, sharp, and readable leadership enhancement program.
A well-organized business book designed to help managers become leaders.
In his latest book, Timms draws on his own long experience of counseling businesses to distill the fundamentals of good leadership and differentiate them from various types of poor management. At the heart of his treatment is what he calls a “superpower”: systems thinking, which management theorist Peter Senge defined in the 1990s as “seeing patterns where others see only events and forces to react to,” and which the author describes as “simply a more enlightened way of looking at problems to discover insights that would otherwise remain undetected.” Developing the superpower of systems thinking will, he contends, allows one to take a wider view, and step back and see unhelpful processes; taking ownership of such behaviors and working to improve them increases personal accountability, he asserts. Timms returns often to this latter concept, discussing how to hold others accountable in an organization, and how to create organizations that are accountable to the wider community. It’s clear from his fast-paced chapters that he views this idea as the crucial difference between being simply a manager and being a leader. Managers might be problem-solvers, but, as Timms puts it, “you are only a leader when others willingly follow you because they trust and respect you, not because they fear the consequences of not doing so.” The author also distills three main habits that readers can develop in order to build this trust and respect: First, don’t rely on blaming others; second, acknowledge one’s own part in any problem; and third, fix processes to get the desired result. In clear, confident prose, Timms outlines a leadership blueprint that has many basic elements in common with other books in the genre, but he presents them energetically, along with useful charts and illustrations. Overall, the author asks readers to ask themselves a daunting but simple question: “Would anybody willingly follow me if they weren’t being paid to do so?” His strategies will help readers find answers.
A lean, sharp, and readable leadership enhancement program.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-03-910229-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
SEEN & HEARD
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