A useful addition to the leadership genre.
Readers may assume that the Army has no problem taking risks, but McChrystal, a retired four-star general and commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, emphasizes that the opposite is true: “to the very marrow of its bones, the United States military is an intensely risk-averse entity.” Charged with defending the nation, the armed forces cannot fail, so “most military leaders prefer belt and suspenders, and a backup set of each.” Yet, despite full knowledge of a threat, the military has been caught by surprise in disasters from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, and civilian leaders have dithered in confronting crises such as Covid-19 and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. McChrystal emphasizes that organizations and individuals fall victim because they focus on the probability of something bad happening (and, if it’s unlikely, paying little attention) instead of what they must do about it. As a solution, the author presents the “Risk Immune System,” a process similar to our body’s defenses against infections. An efficient Risk Immune System detects threats, assesses the risk they represent, and responds. Readers will learn this in the introduction, but these pieces represent only the tip of the iceberg. McChrystal follows with 10 key dimensions essential to his strategy (leadership is “the indispensable factor”) and then a series of solutions to reinforce individual skills and collective collaboration. This is more information about risk than most readers need, but the author lightens the load with a steady stream of stories illustrating disasters (and the occasional success) from history as well as his own experience. A career military officer who rose to the top of his profession, McChrystal has spent a lifetime dealing with risks. While his insights seem directed at fellow officers or business executives, average readers will enjoy the anecdotes (mostly about war and business) and have no quarrel with his advice.
A useful addition to the leadership genre.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-19220-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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