A storehouse of timely advice well-suited to the intended audience.
A guidebook for millennials that helps them navigate a shifting business landscape.
Debut authors Crosbie and Rinner spent a quarter-century as professional trainers at Tero International, an institute famous for grooming top performers. They decoct that entire experience into 100 basic lessons, divided into sections handling social interaction, self-presentation, globalism, leadership, and personal growth. The handbook illustrates some lessons through stories, and all of them are fairly brief—a few pages in length—and end with a neat synopsis and a single line of instruction. The authors have deliberately directed their counsel to millennials, who they believe are uniquely situated to effect seismic transformation and also uniquely vulnerable to the breakneck pace of technologically induced change. Crosbie and Rinner focus on what they call “invisible tools,” the skill set used to achieve successful social interactions. They contend that these abilities, more than any technical skills, are the true ingredients of lasting professional advancement. Many of the lessons specifically target the collective alienation caused by technological hyperconnectedness. To counter this, the authors encourage millennials to remember names, pen personal notes, listen attentively, and confidently court strangers. Other lessons are meant to examine biases, encouraging the embrace of diversity, a proper respect of cultural differences, and a searching examination of one’s assumptions and stereotypes. Additionally, one of the themes of the book is the value of self-awareness. The guide encourages a considerable amount of self-examination, including due diligence regarding self-representation on social media accounts. While the advice is mostly common sense, that doesn’t diminish its value for the intended audience. One genuine challenge for millennials is how to cultivate meaningful relationships in a new world that encourages the shallowest kind of networking, and the authors are particularly strong in this area. Also, the entire work is written in a familiar, unpretentious style that’s clear, direct, and well-organized. If millennials don’t buy this book, parents should purchase it for them.
A storehouse of timely advice well-suited to the intended audience.Pub Date: April 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9986528-1-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Business Publications Corporation Inc.
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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