An effective guide to succeeding in corporate leadership and bringing integrity and determination to work.
A retired executive offers insights from his decades in the corporate world.
In this debut business book, Oshiro shares leadership lessons he learned over more than three decades working for the technology company EDS, founded by Ross Perot and later acquired by HP. The author recounts his evolution from entry-level programmer to manager, overseeing the work of nearly 200 colleagues. Illustrating general principles of management with stories from throughout his career, Oshiro shows how demonstrating responsibility, integrity, and drive is crucial to succeeding as a manager, both of people and projects. The book recounts the author’s best and worst moments at work along with providing a thoughtful discussion of what readers can learn from his experiences. Oshiro is an excellent storyteller, and he presents a vivid picture of corporate life with an enthusiasm that even the most cynical reader will appreciate. Much of the book’s advice for aspiring managers (“Always take on your assignments with a sense of urgency,” for instance) is broadly applicable to both traditional corporations and less formal office settings, making it useful to a wide audience. (The more buttoned-down aspects of working at EDS are less applicable to 21st-century aspiring managers, but the author has an eye for detail and does a great job of depicting a world where employees were not allowed to leave their cubicles in shirtsleeves.) Not all readers will embrace Oshiro’s arguments in favor of a hierarchical organization where workers are ranked and appearance matters, but many will appreciate the holistic approach of EDS, where “employees could have failures that do not define their overall and long-term value to the company.” The prose includes some stylistic quirks, particularly an overreliance on quotation marks for emphasis, but on the whole is highly readable. Oshiro is an engaging narrator who comes across as an authoritative and ethical mentor who is willing to work hard to ensure the next generation of corporate leadership meets his high standards in all aspects of the job.
An effective guide to succeeding in corporate leadership and bringing integrity and determination to work.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72963-483-7
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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