A rousing and clear-eyed guide to setting one’s organization apart.
Consultant Heath offers a five-step plan for taking one’s business to a new level of success.
“Fighting for market share is grueling,” writes the author in her nonfiction debut. “Keeping up with the pace of early growth while protecting and improving margins is tougher than ever.” In order for readers to meet these challenges, she proposes a five-step framework for creating and fostering what she refers to as “Ownable Whitespace”—a place in a crowded market that’s only occupied by you and your product, creating a situation in which “you are not just your ideal customer’s number one choice—you are their only choice.” She asserts that this can be achieved through five steps: “Obsess,” “Differentiate,” “Commit,” “Execute,” and “Adapt.” She elaborates on each in a series of fast-paced chapters filled with anecdotes, bullet points, illustrations, discussion questions, and summaries designed to help her readers grasp key elements while keeping true to their organization’s “Business Ethos.” She specifically shows how one may use a “Brand Manifesto” to steer an organization’s communication strategy. Throughout these playbook sections, Heath effectively uses real-world corporate success stories, such as those of sportswear giant Nike, luxury clothing maker Hermès, or grocery chain Trader Joe’s. Although Heath can resort to bland phrases such as “you can play a different kind of game” or “Giddy Up,” her storytelling energy always makes for engaging reading. She brings a clarity to the importance of finding unique qualities; along the way, she rightly notes that too many organizations stumble into their own market identities, while the greatest success often comes to those who know precisely who they are. New companies, or those struggling to find their footing in a sea of competitors, will find plenty of valuable tips in these pages.
A rousing and clear-eyed guide to setting one’s organization apart.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798891383722
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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