Carefully researched, tightly written, and timely leadership advice.
A compact treatise advances the notion of servant leadership.
Harris, a former pharmaceutical executive and the author of Leader Board (2019), believes it’s time for “a new revolution” that revolves around something he calls “servant leadership.” Drawing on the writings of numerous leadership experts, including Jim Collins, Stephen R. Covey, and Patrick Lencioni, Harris weaves together their thinking with his own beliefs to make a case for servant leaders—those who listen intently, promote teamwork, and generously share credit for success. The book moves from defining servant leadership and identifying its principles to implementing the concept. This involves building personal leadership effectiveness, learning how to use influence and “positive psychology,” developing a strong team, defining the right mission, and becoming a model leader. Each of the first seven chapters is brief but packed with insightful advice and examples. Chapter 8 reviews the key points covered and relates them to other sources. This is as much a motivational work as it is instructional. Harris frequently encourages readers to embrace servant leadership as the best way forward: “You will gain more energy, enthusiasm, positivity, proactivity, intensity, and resilience to take on greater challenges and reap the rewards of doing so.” Given the plethora of books on leadership, it is no easy task to break the mold, and many of the maxims in this volume will no doubt be recognizable to readers. Still, the author’s enthusiasm for the subject is infectious, and some of his observations are noteworthy, such as “Exceptional leaders…know where they are going, and what it will take to get there.” In addition to strongly promoting the development of effective teams, Harris correctly suggests that leaders and their companies should be laser-focused on serving customers: “Creating customer value is the key to sustainable, long-term performance.…Remember: the people who serve the customer are precious.” In an age where some may view leadership as increasingly autocratic, if not dictatorial, the humanistic view expressed by the author is reassuring.
Carefully researched, tightly written, and timely leadership advice.Pub Date: April 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73488-150-9
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Intent Books
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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