An intensely personal guide to better self-esteem and kind but forceful management.
A detailed look at how to become a better leader through self-understanding.
Executive coach Barber says that she wrote this book in order to show people that anyone can change how they see themselves—and how others see them. The author confesses that she went through many years in the business world feeling “invisible” to management, until she decided to make a change, leave her position at Kraft Heinz in 2015, and become a leadership coach. She devotes her energies, she says, to helping others improve how they see themselves, and show them how to use their new realizations to help them become better leaders. She cites the old saw that “people don't leave companies, they leave managers,” and clarifies it, noting that “a bad manager who creates drama and, in some cases, a hostile work environment is a serious problem.” Unfortunately, she writes, too many leaders feel insecure, and a management style based on this feeling can have deleterious effects on people they manage. Barber smoothly weaves together stories from her own experience and case studies from coaching clients and co-workers she’s known, relating wide variety of scenarios involving workers in various capacities whose self-doubt or lack of clarity kept them in the “shadows,” and lacking the confidence to realize their own power. Her wish in all of this, she states, is “for everyone to see the value they bring and be able to talk about it.” In clear and ringingly optimistic prose, she effectively encourages her readers to throw off self-limiting beliefs that readers will find familiar, such as “I am not qualified to do this,” or “everybody else is good at this, but I am not,” and so on. Other readers may feel that some of this optimism may go too far; there are such things as qualifications, after all, that are based on different levels of skill and expertise. That said, its earnestness is genuine, and many in Barber’s audience will find that such positive feedback is exactly what they need to hear.
An intensely personal guide to better self-esteem and kind but forceful management.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73761-044-1
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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