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
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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