A close-up but unevenly presented overview of one man’s expert investment advice.
Professional wealth advisor Olsen presents ideas and tools to help readers make more thoughtful investments.
After a lengthy preamble, the author—a certified public accountant, financial planner, and investment and insurance advisor with decades of experience—aims to explain to readers why and how they should use his unique tool, dubbed “The Investment Scorecard.” It’s designed to clarify potential investment options by helping readers contemplate what Olsen believes to be their critical characteristics, including cost, transparency, liquidity, and understandability. Throughout, the author allows that different people may have different goals for their investments, and he frequently repeats the mantra that, when it comes to strategy, “there is no right or wrong, just different.” A significant portion of the book is dedicated to the notion that that his risk-management-oriented “Tactical Wealth Multiplier” investment philosophy, which requires lots of attention and work, is stronger than the popular, more hands-off “asset allocation” philosophy, which manages risk through diversification. Olsen uses back-testing—in-depth analysis of what happened with an investment portfolio in past market conditions to create assumptions for future decisions—to bolster his argument. Considering the topic, readers might expect textbook-style vocabulary and writing, but for the majority of the book, this is not the case; instead, the writing is conversational (“Wow!! That was a pretty good rant if I say so myself”). However, there are occasional unpolished sentences: “The promise of asset allocation is this.” The tone can also be overly chummy and sometimes patronizing, as when he explains that Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art should not be confused with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “The juxtaposition of the title was simply a play on words by the author.” Olsen also provides an overabundance of metaphors and simplified examples. The graphics used throughout the book are also rather rudimentary and don’t always explicitly relate to or enhance the text’s meaning; other charts add value, but their resolution is often too low to be fully decipherable.
A close-up but unevenly presented overview of one man’s expert investment advice.Pub Date: April 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-97-722221-3
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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