With the authority of experience, King shows how knowing the informal rules is the path to advancement and fulfillment.
A respected expert on the way workplaces really operate provides a wealth of advice.
In her latest book, King, a successful consultant on organizational culture and the author of The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work, casts a wide net, examining the informal rules and practices of workplaces. These rules are often more important than workflow charts and duty statements, but they can be difficult to discern, especially for people whose training is primarily in a technical field. The author focuses on a few essential areas: navigating informal networks, developing awareness, learning adaptive skills, gaining promotions, and finding meaning. She sees “soft skills” as critically important in the age of diversity and remote work. “In the new world, we must learn how to bridge our differences with others so we can collaborate, innovate, and solve complex problems,” she writes. “This means working with people who don’t share your background or identity.” She tracks the process of observing colleagues and more senior executives for guidance on the implicit rules, and she suggests that offering assistance to others is a positive avenue for building connections. For leaders, creating a more inclusive workplace means sharing information and being willing to take chances when allocating projects to stretch employees’ abilities. For employees, readiness to move outside your comfort zone and then seeking feedback builds a presence in crucial networks and marks you as capable of bigger things. In terms of job satisfaction, the keys are good personal relationships and linking individual efforts to a greater objective. King provides practical advice although she has a tendency to repeat her points more than needed. But this is a small issue with a book that would be a useful read for anyone trying to navigate the modern workplace.
With the authority of experience, King shows how knowing the informal rules is the path to advancement and fulfillment.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780063224575
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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