A bracing wake-up call to leaders mired in old ways of employee engagement and retention.
A practical, data-driven approach to building teams that excel.
Jaeckli, founder and CEO of OpenElevator, makes the case that building the “just right” team is what makes an organization successful, asserting that most leaders are going about it the wrong way (“The old-school hiring approach often fails to address the core issue, finding the ‘right’ fit for the manager, for the team, and for the environment”). The book opens with a nautical metaphor about the captain of a finely tuned ship being sabotaged by crew dynamics; the author argues that a “Goldilocks” team, containing neither too much nor too little of any one quality, is essential for navigating turbulent business waters. Per Jaeckli, engagement isn’t about charismatic leadership or team-building retreats—it’s about ensuring alignment between people’s values and interpersonal styles. The author breaks down employee engagement into four different categories: safety and certainty, contribution and purpose, growth and significance, and connection and belonging. Regarding employee retention, Jaeckli writes that HR is not the department best suited to address such issues, as the direct manager wields the most influence. Engagement and retention, the author asserts, are leadership responsibilities, and they start with hiring the right person for a particular job. Jaeckli posits that resumes, interviews, and personality assessments should be replaced by measuring values alignment (what a team member prioritizes in their work) and interpersonal alignment (the ability to work with others), dimensions that can drive collaboration, satisfaction, and loyalty. To help managers measure these criteria, Jaeckli has created the platform OpenElevator. (This book is more than just an advertisement for the author’s service—Jaeckli provides practical solutions to the issues she raises throughout the text.) In addition to providing tips for hiring and retention—and some rudimentary drawings and graphics to bolster those ideas—the book also serves as an effective leadership manual, guiding managers toward a data-driven, bias-free, human-centric team-building process. Leaders who embrace this way of doing things, Jaeckli avers, will ultimately build successful teams that are “just right.”
A bracing wake-up call to leaders mired in old ways of employee engagement and retention.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798895710890
Page Count: 118
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
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