An infectiously evenhanded, useful approach to assessing fairer pay.
A guide offers a comprehensive blueprint for equitable pay.
Gillis begins his book by explaining the groundbreaking concept he hopes will revolutionize the world of fair pay in the workplace: the Quotient Personal Value Calculation, or QTNT PVC. This calculation, according to the author, is “so remarkably simple that, as you learn more, you will wonder why this measurement has never been used in business before now.” The QTNT, Gillis claims, is designed to surpass the standard performance appraisals currently used in managerial systems—mainly because it’s objective, whereas despite widespread opinions to the contrary, those other evaluations are deeply subjective. The QTNT seeks to provide an objective estimation of an employee’s contribution to a workforce. It determines that contribution by taking the value of the worker’s performance and dividing it by the employee’s rate of base pay. Gillis has been a hiring guru for many years, and he’s noticed a tendency of workers to grow numb to such considerations, becoming “so accustomed to simply putting in time on the job that they don’t take the time to look around and think about how they can showcase their achievements.” The highlighting of those accomplishments becomes crucial because, the author’s contentions notwithstanding, the subjective element of the QTNT is the part about estimating the value of a worker’s performance. Gillis provides readers with a broad array of ways for supervisors and workers to come to an equitable calculation of how much actual value each employee generates for the company. The long experience the author brings to the subject is obvious on every page; he comes across continuously as workers’ tireless cheerleader. Every employee in the world has commercial value, he insists, and in these brightly written pages, he seeks to help them all make the most of that worth.
An infectiously evenhanded, useful approach to assessing fairer pay.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950906-96-3
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Indigo River Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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