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
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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