Think of Godin as an anti–Elon Musk and this seemingly lightweight book suddenly acquires a lot of heft.
Offbeat business leadership manifesto that often morphs into a prose poem.
Godin, author of many bestsellers, including Tribes, Poke the Box, and This Is Marketing, begins with a provocation: “If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you already know: work isn’t working.” Bosses are burned out, workers too, and everyone hates being evaluated as if a machine. “Humans are not a resource,” he writes. “We are not a tool.” If you’re running a fast-food outlet or making widgets, notes the author, you may be inclined to keep things as they are since the objective is to produce and sell as much as you can at the lowest possible cost. But burgers and widgets do not innovations make, and in the longer view, they don’t materially add to the advancement of human civilization or constitute anything approaching “significant work.” Nor, in the end, do most Zoom meetings, metrics of how many hits an article gets online, or time-motion studies that include how many minutes an employee spends in the bathroom each day. If you want to get to the significant stuff—in Godin’s repeated but nicely alliterative mantra “Mozart, not Muzak”—then a boss must stop being merely a boss and be a leader. That involves an entirely different way of thinking and being, a mindset that measures how healthy and happy the people inside an organization are and, in turn, how healthy and happy the organization is. Godin’s staccato, sententious style (“Until our existential needs are met, it’s difficult to produce the emotional labor needed for progress and possibility”) may be a little jarring to readers accustomed to graphs and charts and other business-book appurtenances, but there’s a lot of substance underlying the piece on better employer-employee relations and arriving at common, humane goals.
Think of Godin as an anti–Elon Musk and this seemingly lightweight book suddenly acquires a lot of heft.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780593715543
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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