A straightforward guide to success that deserves a prime spot on the bookshelves of career women aspiring to reach the...
A variety of no-nonsense strategies for women who aspire to be leaders in business.
Well-suited to deliver these rules of the game, Packard began her career in HBO’s sales division, then joined NBC to help launch the cable-programming sector, including CNBC. She is the co-founder of Scripps Networks Interactive and the former COO of HGTV. In this book, the author outlines the rules of gamesmanship. Ambition rests easier on men than women, she writes, citing a study showing that “competent” women are often “perceived as unlikeable.” While being bossy is acceptable for men, it’s considered a negative for women. Early in her career, Packard blanched when a neighbor called her ambitious, but she learned to embrace the word. Women, she writes, bring plenty of advantages to the game—among others, intuitive brains, interpersonal skills, strong team management skills and observational listening skills. However, they need to build competitive muscle to succeed in business. (Message to mothers who want their daughters to grow up to be CEOs: High school and college sports are a great training ground for business success.) The author examines the skills, behaviors and strategies of gamesmanship in corporate settings, including mastering the brinksmanship to close or walk away from a deal, building rapport with your colleagues and keeping your cool. While the advice is not groundbreaking, Packard provides useful examples from her experiences and those of other female executives. Her concise book offers ways to level the playing field. If winning were the only theme, the book’s appeal would be limited, but Packard presents her ideas in the context of treating people, including competitors, fairly and respectfully. Great leaders, she writes, demonstrate good sportsmanship whether they win or lose, have the grit to move on from mistakes and defeats, and build a team with shared values.
A straightforward guide to success that deserves a prime spot on the bookshelves of career women aspiring to reach the highest corporate ranks.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7352-0537-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Prentice Hall/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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
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
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