A canny, insightful, and very readable take on the brave new world of work.
Economic upheavals—from the rise of artificial intelligence to the fall of 9-to-5 office jobs—will profoundly change companies and employees, according to this savvy business forecast.
Collaboration and technology consultant Simon explores nine trends facing organizations and their complex and often surprising implications. These include employees who are newly empowered by tight labor markets to demand more from employers on everything from wages to corporate political commitments; the new normal of work-from-home and hybrid jobs that take workers out from under distrustful bosses’ gazes; advances in automation and AI that will make business processes more efficient and lead to millions of layoffs—perhaps reining in some of those empowered workers—but not necessarily raise productivity much; and soaring inflation as disrupted supply chains and protectionist barriers bring production back to the United States. The author also examines blockchain technology that will make real estate transactions, accounting, and background checks more transparent; virtual and augmented reality systems that surgeons will use to repair spines and Walmart will utilize to train associates; the increased use—and abuse—of statistical analytics that give people ever more data, much of it unimportant or misleading; and the fractional ownership of artworks, office buildings, and executive positions in hyperfluid markets. From this overview, Simon distills a few pithy recommendations, advising business leaders to “Steer Into the Skid” of change by embracing new technology and accommodating workers’ preferences. (He takes a dim view of Elon Musk’s mass firing of Twitter underlings.) The author deftly mixes big-picture surveys of the drift of technology, demographics, and society with illustrative drilldowns on nuts-and-bolts examples, often taken from the tech sector, like Uber’s adoption of robotic processing automation to handle its accounts payable system. He manages to make this potentially dry material lively, writing in a witty, down-to-earth style. (“No one likes getting their teeth scraped, but the benefits of regular cleanings far exceed their costs. Does the same principle apply when you sit down with your boss to review your performance over the past year? In general, no. With rare exceptions, annual performance reviews…never really and consistently accomplished their stated goals: motivating employees and changing their behavior.”) Bosses and workers alike will find much nourishing food for thought here.
A canny, insightful, and very readable take on the brave new world of work.Pub Date: April 3, 2023
ISBN: 9798985814774
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Racket Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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