A thought-provoking, if sometimes overly quippy, business advice manual.
A self-help book that presents series of tactics for freeing up one’s entrepreneurial power.
“You're not alone,” writes leadership consultant Medcalf at the beginning of his nonfiction debut, getting right down to essentials. “All around you, leaders, teams and whole businesses are frantically scrambling to meet operational demands.” Medcalf aims the advice in this book at such overwhelmed people, offering them a wide array of pointers, such as using as a Commitment Inventory to eliminate wasteful activities, including “zombie meetings” (“those recurring appointments that used to have life and purpose, and now don’t seem to achieve much”), and creating a Projects List to help distinguish between, as Medcalf insightfully puts it, “projects and next actions.” To help readers feel more in control (“I’m calling on you to be the powerful person you are,” he writes), he unfolds intriguing concepts, such as “Strategic Time,” broken into quadrants of “Tactics,” “Influence,” “Mindset,” and “Environment.” Along the way, he reminds readers that they can’t resist what often feels like an “onslaught” without making use of the “powerful weapon” of their will to cut through what’s unimportant. Over the course of this book, Medcalf does have a tendency to indulge far too often in TED Talk-style soundbites, such as “Context frames content,” “tiny is transformational,” and the questionable “every ‘yes’ hides a ‘no.’ ” However, over the course of this book’s fast-paced and well-designed chapters, the author manages to effectively take readers through a wide variety of challenges that they may encounter as they attempt to grow their business. Throughout, he employs a strong, intensely readable prose style that will keep readers’ attention, and many of the concepts he conveys along the way are convincing.
A thought-provoking, if sometimes overly quippy, business advice manual.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781915036742
Page Count: 241
Publisher: Xquadrant
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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