Genuinely useful advice and recognition for members of a sometimes-overlooked profession.
Seasoned event producer Miller, the founder and CEO of Entire Productions, distills 25 years of experience into a manual focusing on an often thankless job: organizing high-stakes events.
The book presents corporate event planners with a sophisticated framework for orchestrating corporate happenings that make an impact—from small internal meetings to global, multiday conferences. Each chapter methodically builds on the last, covering everything from proposal request processes and vendor negotiations to key performance indicators, return on investment, and the integration of artificial intelligence in an event’s planning stages. Miller’s core insight is that event professionals are often overworked, under-resourced, and misunderstood; her book effectively raises the profile of this career, and she backs up her recommendations with firsthand interviews with industry veterans, who speak on and off the record with authentic examples. Detailed case studies—including one that details a “Secret Experience” event, which the author co-produced with hospitality company Convene—bring abstract planning concepts vividly to life. Throughout, Miller emphasizes how to align events with corporate goals and demonstrates how planners can advocate for themselves by thinking strategically and proposing measurable outcomes. Chapters on sustainability, outsourcing, and emerging trends, such as the “transformation economy,” ensure the work remains timely: “Transformative events go beyond memorable experiences to create lasting change in attendees—whether it’s personal growth, professional development, or a sense of purpose.” Miller writes like a peer mentor: approachable and assertive, she balances motivational language with no-nonsense practicality. She’s encouraging but honest about the stress and systemic inefficiencies characteristic of the field. Summaries, toolkits, and downloadable templates make this manual a fine working reference. The subject matter sprawls a bit—topics range from AI to corporate social responsibility to immersive experience design—but Miller’s clear, grounded voice keeps the material cohesive. This guide is ideal for midcareer professionals looking to elevate their status within their organizations. It’s also an overdue validation of the indispensable role that event professionals play in shaping corporate culture.
Genuinely useful advice and recognition for members of a sometimes-overlooked profession.Pub Date: April 19, 2025
ISBN: 9798985600285
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Poignant Press
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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