A useful and stimulating guide to building a career under trying circumstances.
An African woman maneuvers her way to success in a hypermasculine industry in this business self-helper.
Mpofu, an executive leadership coach, derives career and management lessons from her unusual life story. Born into a middle-class family in Zimbabwe, she was encouraged by her father to pursue a career in a STEM field. She earned a degree in chemistry and then a Ph.D. at the University of South Australia and took a job in South Africa at the multinational Anglo American Platinum mining company. It was a rewarding but difficult road, in her telling. As a Black woman in an industry traditionally dominated by White men, Mpofu often found herself “the only one in the room who looks like me.” Initially relegated to routine tasks, she had to lobby her bosses for more challenging assignments. When she got them, they involved trips to mineral-processing facilities in the field, which caused issues for her as a single mom as well as sartorial problems with the coveralls tailored for men’s bodies. Moving from production to the business-strategy side of the company, the author was passed over for promotion in favor of a male hire. A leap to a new company brought her a vice presidency, but when that position was made redundant, she had to scramble to reinvent herself. From these ups and downs, Mpofu distills wisdom on business success, including the importance of setting clear, actionable career goals; building networks of female mentors and co-workers who can help one another weather male-dominated workplaces; cultivating a humane leadership style; avoiding feelings of inadequacy and imposter syndrome; projecting confidence; and persevering through setbacks with sheer grit.
Mpofu’s autobiographical narrative, while often engaging, makes for a somewhat disorganized and repetitive framework for her ideas, which are not presented in a systematic way. (The book’s few exercises are perfunctory and often just refer readers to a lesson template on her coaching company’s website.) Many of her managerial and motivational tropes are familiar, but she has original and captivating ones of her own, some suggested by her experiences on safari. (An incident in which an elephant snaked its trunk around her neck illustrates the importance of staying calm in a crisis, and she enjoins managers to be generous with their underlings the way a lion, after gorging on a kill, will allow vultures and hyenas to feast on the rotting remains.) Mpofu’s prose sometimes lapses into fulsome management-lit uplift (“We need leaders who are visionary, compassionate and empathetic, with high levels of consciousness; leaders who value their employees and communities, and create sustainable shared value”), but she can also be pithily aphoristic—“One must be resilient and think fast, rather than wait for life to happen”—and even lyrical in the poems she sprinkles into the text. (“I am thankful even to those who have given me pain / Without pain, there is no growth, there is no gain.”) Mpofu’s writing sharply registers the galling implicit bias facing women in the office—“When the table is taken away and the door is shut in your face, leaning in doesn’t help”—but her program of working hard, self-directing, forging relationships, and being open to new experiences is a hopeful, empowering one.
A useful and stimulating guide to building a career under trying circumstances.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-64-523371-1
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Peak Performance With Patience Pty Ltd
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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