An inspiring guide that conveys the passion and promise of the food business with pragmatic advice.
Guilbault, a food industry executive and consultant, shares her experiences (and a few recipes) while providing tips on how to pursue a rewarding career in her field.
This debut guide begins by teeing up the huge career potential of the lucrative food industry: “You can make a ton of money. You can have the life of creativity and freedom you want. You can make an impact on the lives of others. You can travel the world. You can even change the world.” The author then offers advice on how to develop this fulfilling career, drawing from and detailing her own journey from high school dropout who got fired from the California Pizza Kitchen as a teenager to Le Cordon Bleu–trained chef and, later, food-operations executive for the Pret a Manger and Le Pain Quotidien restaurant chains and Google, among others. Now a consultant, the author organizes her book in two parts: “Getting Started in the World of Food” and “Taking Your Place at the Managers’ Table.” Tips range from building your “resilience muscle” to keep “toughing out the ‘crumby’ jobs and seeing the trail they’re building” to creating a “Personal Board of Directors”—confidants who will “give you the perspective you need to shine through the tough moments.” The author’s “Management Big Five” mantra is that it’s important to balance the needs of the business, your bosses, your customers, your team, and, “finally, the needs of yourself.” This book dishes out its career advice, which often has a tough-love tone, in a humorous, food metaphor–filled narrative that effectively draws on accounts of the author’s own challenges. She also includes some of her favorite thematically appropriate recipes, such as “Leadership Lecithin” Mayonnaise and “Most Definitely a Neurosis” Rosemary Dark Chocolate Cake, as well as links to videos of other industry professionals offering career insights. Although other career development books may contain similar advice, this book’s lively tone and from-the-trenches perspective make it a welcome addition to the genre.
An inspiring guide that conveys the passion and promise of the food business with pragmatic advice.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781774582473
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Page Two Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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