An extremely familiar but engaging rehashing of the basics of people-focused sales leadership.
Estis and Estis present a multi-step framework for success in this business guide.
In their nonfiction debut the authors lay out the “30 Steps to Successful Selling,” which they’ve espoused throughout their professional lives and have recently been adopted by billion-dollar organizations like the Dallas Cowboys as simply “30 Steps to Success.” The change in emphasis from business to the broader world suits the Estis brothers just fine: “While the list was built for sales, and some steps are sales oriented,” they write, “mastering them can lead to overall success for anyone, regardless of function.” Many of these 30 steps are the staple stuff of all business management books (noting the importance of time management and customer service, for example), but the authors further refine these steps into a concept they characterize as “human-centered leadership.” Its precepts include “Focus on Their Development”; “Go for Coffee”; “Practice Transparency”; “Create Safety”; “Build a Team Environment”; “Create Connection—Have Fun”; “Be Vulnerable”; “Have Tough Conversations”; and “Be Decisive.” Although these concepts are self-explanatory, the authors, after first providing an autobiographical chapter, proceed to explain them anyway, offering many anecdotes from their business experience and including bullet-pointed insets under the heading “Prepare for Impact.” The authors are far too comfortable rephrasing tired truisms as profound truths, writing “Stay in the learning lane,” “You must give people compelling reasons and evidence to buy into your ideas,” and “don’t miss deadlines.” But they bring a good deal of upbeat energy to their discussion of what makes a “servant leader”—someone who’s deeply connected to the people and the values of their team. The text repeatedly brings everything back to the original 30 steps, ultimately helping readers appreciate what the Dallas Cowboys saw in the approach.
An extremely familiar but engaging rehashing of the basics of people-focused sales leadership.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781637556481
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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