Impassioned and thought-provoking leadership advice.
A guide offers a fresh perspective on business success as a function of life design.
According to entrepreneur and financial strategist Benaroya, leadership starts with designing one’s own life—a novel approach for a business book. Life design, writes the author, involves five sequential steps: “1. Ground stories with FACTS.” “2. Establish your PRINCIPLES.” “3. Harness ENERGY from the environment.” “4. Get in and stay in your GENIUS ZONE.” “5. Take ACTION.” Each of these steps forms a section of the volume, and every part includes detailed descriptions, examples, and exercises. All of these elements are standard fare in both self-improvement and business books, but this manual’s laser focus on life design is refreshingly unique. In fact, Benaroya labels as “Designers” the 12 entrepreneurs who are extensively quoted throughout the work; their candid, firsthand experiences help enrich the content. For example, when the author notes that many business owners revealed in conversation that they often fear “they are more lucky than good,” one of the Designers shares this related experience: “When I finally stopped trying to bang down the doors that were closed and lean into the doors that were open, things started to improve for me. I began to look at rejection as protection.” Similarly, Benaroya illustrates the importance of principles (step two) with another Designer’s insight. In rejecting an offer from a venture capital firm that she thought was too one-sided, she noted: “That moment helped me crystallize what I really valued. It was like it slapped me in the face and said, This is what I believe. And you know, sometimes we don’t know what we believe until our views are challenged in some way.” These observations come from founders of a diverse range of small companies, some of which are women- or minority-owned. Their candid comments reveal the kinds of difficult, complex leadership issues they face. Other material in the book is equally illuminating, such as the author’s excellent advice, along with an exercise, for how to find “your genius zone.” Benaroya builds a convincing argument that better life design produces more business success.
Impassioned and thought-provoking leadership advice.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73707-390-1
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Shemoto Pres
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
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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