A sometimes technical but ultimately stirring call to sing your own praises in the workplace.
Gillis presents a new game plan for enhancing employees’ value to employers.
At the heart of this book is a process dubbed QTNT (an abbreviation for “quotient”), described by its creator as “pure simplicity” (though it does involve some arithmetic). QTNT employs a tool called the Accomplishments Inventory, which employees at all levels can use to determine their Personal Value Calculation (PVC). This information in hand, they can then “land terrific jobs, pay increases, advancement, and bonuses commensurate with their performance by producing these ‘living’ documents at the appropriate time.” Central to this project is Gillis’ contention that workers can’t rely on other people speaking up for them—they must do it themselves, and they should use QTNT to quantify that act and have the figures ready to hand. “Maintain a professional inventory of your ‘wins,’” Gillis writes. “No matter how large or how small, over time they add up.” Using math in addition to case studies, the author breaks down ways in which employees can map their own activities onto a company’s profits and growth and use PVC to identify their own contributions, all with the goal of strengthening their positions when it comes to seeking advancement in the form of raises or promotions. The appearance of mathematical calculations might be daunting for some readers, but the tone of brisk confidence Gillis uses throughout will convince his audience that self-advocacy is the only kind that actually yields results. (The author bluntly dismisses traditional performance appraisals given by employers: “They don’t work.”) One canny and effective move he makes is to stress to employers that it’s in their own best interests to promote QTNT among their staff. “Let them know this is not a competition,” Gillis writes. “This is about adopting an accomplishment mindset with a potential payout on the other side.”
A sometimes technical but ultimately stirring call to sing your own praises in the workplace.Pub Date: March 11, 2024
ISBN: 9798218392864
Page Count: 150
Publisher: The Really Useful Job Search Company
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2024
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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