A brusque and powerfully worded call to combat corporate stagnation.
Hagopian offers a series of sharply conceived tactics for improving business performance.
The aim of this “manifesto,” writes the author, a longtime business veteran, is to destroy the “comfortable delusions” that most businesses are sold by consulting firms. “Recognize that stagnation, not competition, not market conditions, nor bad luck, is the true enemy killing your business,” he cautions. Modern businesses should stop believing that additional analysis will save them, Hagopian writes; stagnation is a choice, per the author, and he condemns the cycle in which companies “implement the same approaches competitors have already deployed and expect different results.” The author assures readers that he won’t sugarcoat reality to make them comfortable—he strongly advocates strategic ruthlessness, which involves “killing good things to do great things and refusing to work on lower priorities no matter how much people complain.” Virtually everything the author advises lines up with his intention to eradicate stagnation, which he sees as the deadly enemy of progress in business; comfort, he writes, has destroyed more businesses than competition ever could. Hagopian characterizes the various elements of his manifesto as the only practical guidance a corporation needs, requiring only the will to implement them and “the discipline to maintain that choice when resistance intensifies, enthusiasm wanes, and comfortable mediocrity beckons.” At every stage, he warns readers against accepting easy answers or pat routines.
Hagopian writes with unflagging energy from the first page to the last, clearly reveling in the tone of a no-nonsense truth-teller as he urges readers to ask themselves uncomfortable questions in order to gain potentially profitable insights (such as “What do we assume customers value that we’ve never validated,” or “What would we do if starting fresh with no legacy constraints?”). The terrific forward momentum he imparts to his prose is sometimes slowed by the sheer profusion of directives he offers; readers will be bombarded with questions and discussions of subjects like Environmental Misalignment Genes and Cognitive Blindness Genes in addition to more methods, matrices, and models than they’ll be able to keep straight without a scorecard. Fortunately, the author’s bedrock of long experience cuts through the tangle of interlocking systems; he’s at his strongest when he’s simply imparting hard-won bits of wisdom. “Customers reveal which orthodoxies need smashing through compensating behaviors, not articulation,” he observes. “They can’t tell you how to smash orthodoxies but watch what they struggle with.” While this sentiment may show traces of the disdain for customer intelligence that infects so many business management books, it also reveals the seemingly counterintuitive thinking that is this book’s greatest strength. Hagopian alludes to his long career of increasing value for companies that have adopted his methods, which gives him the confidence to rally readers to confront the “comfortable ignorance” that he clearly sees as the underlying enemy of business progress. (Don’t wait for perfect data or 95% certainty, he insists—speed is often necessary.) His zeal is bracing, even if some readers will be put off by his all-or-nothing approach; for instance, many of his proposed methods call for the summary firing of significant percentages of personnel. The author’s vividly rendered vision is surgically precise.
A brusque and powerfully worded call to combat corporate stagnation.Pub Date: July 14, 2026
ISBN: 9798888249741
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2026
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
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