A thought-provoking call to revamp the office by incorporating the surprisingly compatible elements of yoga.
A debut guide advocates a meditation-infused approach for the business world.
Roberts constructs her book around what appears at first glance to be an unworkable strategy: adapting the outlook and principles of yoga, where stillness and mindfulness are prized above all, to the business domain, where hard-charging attitudes and practical momentum usually rule the day. The manual’s seemingly conflicted title signals this contrast; as Roberts puts it, “When you overthink things, you disrupt your ability to find your flow.” The key concepts that make this confluence possible, as the author concisely but patiently lays out in the course of her book, are calm and communication—that by working to create a quiet, inner space through “hot” meditation, she’s able to center herself and facilitate the action required by the various management roles in which she’s found herself. Her guide is fleshed out with both extensive glimpses of her own autobiography and wide-ranging echoes and hints of other self-help and business motivation works she’s read. The latter often becomes the manual’s main weakness. The volume displays a penchant for clichés like “just do it” or “be careful what you wish for, because it might just come true,” and a willingness to repeat the kind of self-evident nonsense that’s unfortunately a staple of the genre, as when The Game of Numbers author Nick Murray is quoted saying lines like “We can always learn by doing. We can never do by learning.” Luckily, the bulk of the book is a thoughtful exploration of the sometimes-startling benefits to be derived from importing Eastern meditation viewpoints to the office and the boardroom—and how the yoga and business worlds are in fact more similar than most readers would believe. Roberts points out, for example, that in both realms the old rule of “garbage in, garbage out” is true.
A thought-provoking call to revamp the office by incorporating the surprisingly compatible elements of yoga.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5026-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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