by Pam Marmon ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2023
An inspirational, inward-looking book about adjusting to a new normal, undermined somewhat by occasionally bland prose.
Consultant Marmon presents a concise guidebook to managing change in the workplace.
In these pages, the author addresses what many professionals consider a potential nightmare: Their organization is undergoing a major shift, and they’re the ones tasked with implementing sweeping changes, regardless of obstacles and without complaint. Often, it also means delivering lots of bad news. Drawing on her own experience as a CEO and consultant as well as on many interviews she’s conducted with senior leaders over the years, Marmon urges her readers to avoid thinking of themselves as victims but rather to embrace changes as empowering things: “You have control over your work,” she writes. “Change is not happening to you; change is happening for you.” She views statements such as “I’m just a cog in the wheel” as declarations of weakness and urges her target readership of middle managers to reject such passive framing in favor of more active engagement with the process of transformation: “If you don’t find strength and courage to move forward,” she asserts, “your past will remain your present.” Marmon's approach of fixing problems by addressing the fears from which they spring is a refreshingly personal one, and many managers caught in a bind will welcome it. Unfortunately, the book is weakened by its tendency toward gnomic little proverbs, such as “You may be right, but you'll never know for sure unless you act,” which occur far too often in these pages. Such familiar slogans tend to dilute what is otherwise a bracing underlying message: “I want to help you find your voice,” she writes, “discover your courage, grow your confidence, reclaim your power, and increase your influence.”
An inspirational, inward-looking book about adjusting to a new normal, undermined somewhat by occasionally bland prose.Pub Date: May 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781544542010
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Pam Marmon
by Matthew Desmond ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2023
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Erin Meyer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2014
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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