A detailed and relatable career manual.
Business strategist and public speaker Palmer offers Black women a guidebook to climbing the corporate ladder.
The author notes that she quickly learned, while working in a corporate setting, that the “workplace wasn’t a meritocracy; it was a chessboard” on which many Black women were never taught all the moves. This book opens with Palmer’s own story, from when she received a full-tuition scholarship at an elite private college at age 16 to when she experienced early success in health care administration. Although a corporate leadership position gave her a confidence boost, she came to believe that the cutthroat world of American business was a “rigged” game, designed to marginalize Black women like herself. Addressing her book to “the sisterhood of Black women in corporate America,” Palmer shares her advice for navigating unwritten rules of the workplace: “The few times I tried to question the structure and why certain people were always in the room,” she recalls, “I quickly saw the costs.” The book notes the difficult terrain that Black women must navigate (“You might find yourself working twice as hard yet told you’re barely meeting expectations”) and offers practical advice on how to maintain one’s professional reputation, increase one’s visibility without risking overexposure, and identify and protect oneself from workplace adversaries. The book’s self-empowerment message is careful to emphasize that Black women may succeed in their careers “not by changing who [they] are,” but by leveraging their skills in the context of business politics. Palmer, whose work has been featured in Writer’s Digest and Black Enterprise, among other national publications, has a writing style that blends realistic assessment of race relations with an optimistic, confidence-building message. Her emphasis on reader engagement is aided by accessible organization, with each chapter featuring easy-to-understand lists, concluding summaries, and questions for reflection.
A detailed and relatable career manual.Pub Date: May 12, 2025
ISBN: 9798992199420
Page Count: 384
Publisher: SmallPub
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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