Amusing tales and tidbits surprisingly pertinent to business professionals.
A professor offers a novel approach that encourages emulating comedians as a way to make career and business improvements.
McGraw, a marketing/psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, knows a thing or two about comedy. He founded the Humor Research Lab and co-authored The Humor Code (2014). In this unusually engaging read, he turns his attention to the behind-the-scenes world of stand-up, improv, and sketch comedy. That would be intriguing enough, but McGraw takes it further, showing how comedians think and act and relating it to business in an effort to “revolutionize your work life—and beyond.” From the outset, the author makes it clear his goal is not to teach readers to be funny but rather to “think funny.” The book’s chapters address what comedians do that could be applied to a business setting. For example, “Step Out of the Stream” demonstrates how comics often take risks and break rules. McGraw illustrates his thesis beautifully with anecdotes about comedians and excerpts from their acts, followed by several examples of businesses that succeeded by taking risks and breaking rules. “Cooperate to Innovate” serves to explode the myth of the solo comedian; here, the author relates the story of Merrill Markoe. She crafted jokes and bits for David Letterman, whose television show won Emmys for outstanding writing. “Pretty good on their own, they became fantastic when they teamed up,” writes McGraw. The author delves deeply into cooperation as part of sketch and improv comedy, citing additional hands-on examples. One of the more intriguing concepts he introduces is “complementation…the magic made when opposites come together, creating a sum that is greater than its parts.” McGraw again illustrates this idea with brief case studies. In addition to excellent examples from both comedy and business, the volume features two unique sidebars: “Shtick From Shane,” interspersed humorous short takes from stand-up comedian Shane Mauss, and “Act Out,” insightful observations from the author that perfectly highlight the comedy-business connection. Throughout the book, McGraw employs an animated yet authoritative writing style enhanced by a rich sense of humor.
Amusing tales and tidbits surprisingly pertinent to business professionals.Pub Date: March 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0807-8
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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