An inspiring primer on navigating one’s life with self-knowledge and integrity.
A public relations executive and strategy consultant provides his thoughts on how to build, wield, and retain power and influence in an everchanging world in this advice guide.
Dilenschneider helmed Hill & Knowlton from 1986 to 1991 and now leads his own public relations firm, The Dilenschneider Group. In this book, he details how to develop personal power and influence while interacting with others in order to achieve one’s desired life and career goals. Its first part focuses on self-examination: discovering what one’s passions and abilities are and collecting feedback on how one is perceived by others. This analysis, Dilenschneider asserts, is critical in informing and guiding one’s future actions and decision-making. The book then segues into offering tips regarding more specific activities, including networking (starting by cultivating three people as part of an ongoing process); effective communication (which, he says, is less about style and more about being clear in one’s messaging); and what Dilenschneider terms “memorable” management, which focuses on having respect and enthusiasm for other people’s opinions. Dilenschneider dedicates the final part of the book to a discussion of how to maintain one’s power and influence while handling crises and dealing with everchanging trends in the industry, workplace, and society. He recommends having a team and plan in place for when crises occur, and assessing what are truly “hard trends” of lasting impact in one’s personal life and workplace. Dilenschneider concludes this book with a recommendation to help and advise others—and thus pay one’s power forward.
The author’s latest offering is a well-organized work that not only provides readers with valuable, evergreen core advice, particularly regarding self-assessment, but also useful commentary on hard trends, including how the Covid-19 pandemic has transformed the workplace. In the early pages of this book, Dilenschneider acknowledges there are countless other business books on these topics available to readers, but he can correctly claim that his “comes to you from decades of experience working with some of the most successful companies in the world—and the people who lead them.” The author certainly demonstrates a distinct and authoritative viewpoint on his subject matter, even if some of the examples that he provides along the way may be quite familiar to some readers. One of them, regarding recognizing when to pivot in one’s career, tells the story of James Patterson’s moving from a career as an advertising professional to a much more successful one as an author, which is an oft-told tale. Still, Dilenschneider also offers plenty of timely strategic pointers in this book, including recommendations to stay abreast of what’s happening on social media platforms, given their power in the business world, and to recognize that the hybrid workplace is indeed the new reality. Most of all, Dilenschneider provides readers with an important and inspiring ethical directive, demonstrated through examples in his career and others’, to have an element of the “commonweal” in one’s quest for personal influence and power.
An inspiring primer on navigating one’s life with self-knowledge and integrity.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781637742938
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Matt Holt/BenBella
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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: tomorrow
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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