An insightful and practical must-read for leaders focused on the future.
A guide offers advice on fostering empathy in the modern workplace.
Creator of the podcast Transforming Work, Wade builds on two years of anecdotes and interviews in this meaningful discussion of empathy. Defined by the author as “the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and feel what they are feeling,” empathy is increasingly understood as vital for business success. Yet its application can overwhelm leaders torn between efficiency and individualism. While Wade acknowledges that human-centric workplaces can be “messy,” she compellingly asserts that empathy gives businesses a crucial competitive advantage. Providing flexibility and customization for teams and consumers alike, empathy drives adaptation. For leaders eager to explore more empathetic processes, Wade provides helpful tips, including guidance for assessing different work models, creating empathy profiles, adopting meaningful metrics, and evaluating company culture through stakeholders’ eyes. Moreover, the author asserts, attitude is the key to a successful metamorphosis. A willingness to learn, listen, and experiment can transform a company from within, improving all aspects of business operations in the process. Easy to read and filled with effective advice, the manual delivers a valuable resource for professionals of all backgrounds. Demystifying the concept of empathy, Wade challenges the idea that human-centric workplaces are excessively emotional or unstructured—fears that can hinder the development of flexible policies. Instead, the author posits that empathy is about empowerment and inclusion, which enable team members to perform at their best. And though change always comes with some risk of confusion, Wade notes that the Covid-19 pandemic exposed long-standing vulnerabilities in workplace culture. Now that leaders are aware of the sudden social and corporate challenges they may again be asked to navigate, the question is no longer if businesses can afford to concentrate on the needs of their employees, but if they can afford not to.
An insightful and practical must-read for leaders focused on the future.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77458-151-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2022
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
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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