Earnest, if familiar, management advice from a longtime medical professional.
West offers entrepreneurs concise guidance on business management, informed by her own experiences as a veterinarian.
The author starts off by noting how many business owners have plenty of passion but little knowledge of the day-to-day basics of operating an enterprise, such as meeting human resources needs, maintaining inventory, streamlining workflows, and upgrading technology. West offers a management approach that she describes as commonplace in the medical field, based on the acronym “S.O.A.P.,” which stands for “Subjective data, Objective data, Assessment, and Plan.” In medicine, “Subjective data” refers to how a patient feels, and “Objective data” is the result of diagnostic testing. “Assessment” is the act of identifying a patient’s problems, and “Plan” is the recommended treatment. West creates a four-step course of action focused on how management and employees feel about aspects of a business, including data points such as financial reports, key performance indicators, and analysis of the equipment a company is using, as well as the identification of problems, and a path toward improvement. She urges managers to create a formal, written plan to “triage” the issues they face, and she uses examples from her career managing a veterinary office, particularly focusing on the difficulties brought about by the covid-19 pandemic. Readers who are familiar with popular business-management books may find some aspects of this book repetitive, and they’ll come across many familiar ideas; for example, West is a proponent of the well-known Pareto principle, in which “80 percent of consequences come from 20 percent of causes,” and focuses at length on the importance of creating a workplace culture. Overall, though, many readers will find this book engaging, and its focus on big ideas makes it a comfortable introduction to the business-management genre for readers with a medical background. For example, she effectively hammers home comparisons between running a business and diagnosing a patient in every chapter: “If the patient isn’t breathing or the heart isn’t pumping blood correctly…the doctor immediately acts to correct these life-threatening issues…. Business entities can also have emergencies—situations and legal troubles that threaten financial health, brand reputation, and so on.”
Earnest, if familiar, management advice from a longtime medical professional.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781966629290
Page Count: 170
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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