An appealing, wide-ranging, if somewhat unchallenging look at the core tenets of leadership.
A consultant and former educator and college football coach offers leadership advice in this debut motivational guide.
“Leadership is not easy at any age or in any assignment,” Hjelseth writes in his book. “Effective leadership requires vision, wisdom, discernment, decision making, communication, confidence, and follow-through.” In his pithy, engaging narrative, the author seeks to explore the relative values and mechanisms of these elements of leadership. He draws on his own life history and feedback from a wide variety of business leaders, coaches, and inspirational speakers. This work is the distillation of all that he’s learned over the years, with each chapter ending with a series of “Questions To Affect Your Life” that are intentionally open-ended (things like “How do you think relationships are best built?”) to provoke introspection and conversation. “Attitude is the key to relationships, happiness, and emotional health,” Hjelseth writes at one point. “Attitude trumps ability. Believe in God, and believe in yourself.” The manual is structured around a handful of very familiar, tent-pole self-help headings like “Faith,” “Leadership,” and “Teamwork,” and the author’s frequent references to basic observations about these subjects can sometimes give his guide a derivative feel. But Hjelseth’s personality keeps everything readable, and when he writes about the importance of humor (“As I look back at the various roles I have filled over the years, I know that being fun and creating fun have been key aspects of my journey”), readers will readily believe him. This is a warm, friendly book, brightened throughout by the author’s long experience as a football coach, an occupation that tends to put theoretical life advice to extremely real and concrete tests and can therefore separate the junk from the sound counsel rather effectively. In fact, it’s Hjelseth’s always generous evaluations of others—athletes, coaches, businesspeople—that work most effectively in building his readers’ trust in his own judgments.
An appealing, wide-ranging, if somewhat unchallenging look at the core tenets of leadership.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-973693-14-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2020
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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