A concise, upbeat guide for women who have grown bored or impatient with their positions as well as for those new to the...
Leadership coaches counsel professional women on how to free themselves from unproductive patterns of behavior that sabotage their career advancement.
Helgesen (The Web of Inclusion: Architecture for Building Great Organizations, 2005, etc.) and Goldsmith (Management/Dartmouth Tuck School of Business; Triggers: Creating Behavior that Lasts—Becoming the Person You Want to Be, 2015, etc.) team up in this self-help guide to getting ahead as a woman in male-dominated executive circles. The authors argue that men and women typically present different self-limiting behaviors in business, with women more likely to take on too much work and take too little credit for their achievements. True to the self-help genre, the work assures its readers that they need no outside help or special skills beyond their eagerness to advance. The practical approach encourages women to develop a greater self-awareness of their worst behaviors and then stop doing them. The list of errors to eradicate range from the predictable (negativity) to the unexpected (“overvaluing expertise”), and the authors emphasize that some of the behaviors, including perfectionism, might have served women well earlier in their careers. Helgesen and Goldsmith’s collective coaching style abounds with positive energy, and the brisk lessons alternate with anonymous anecdotes from real-life clients. Of the 12 bad habits holding women back, they suggest that readers take aim at two or three of their own most damaging tendencies rather than address them all. Stopping short of suggesting how women might proceed differently than men once they become leaders, the authors advise the ambitious to begin with what lies solely under their control, eliminating the negative consequences of habitual, often unconscious behaviors in order to gain the power to affect much larger conversations. They offer the kind of advice that women further along in their careers might wish they had known, from sidestepping the pitfalls of negative office culture to leveraging alliances with co-workers.
A concise, upbeat guide for women who have grown bored or impatient with their positions as well as for those new to the professional world and its leadership roles.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-44012-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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