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 frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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