Sound—if self-promotional—advice on creating a sturdy organizational culture.
Two business consultants make the case for having a strong, principled corporate culture.
Hinton and debut author Yager draw on their own research and experience as they promote their firm’s disciplined approach to helping organizations transform their cultures and become “conscious” businesses. Despite the underlying sales pitch, their book could prove quite helpful to senior executives, beginning with its definition of a “Culture”—“that inexplicable element called energy that attracts customers to your stores or website.” The first chapter explains why it’s important to have a positive culture and what can happen if an organization has a toxic one. As examples of the harmful effects of dysfunction, the authors cite well-known organizations and their missteps—USA Gymnastics (sexual abuse convictions by the team doctor), the Catholic Church (pedophile priests), and Facebook (exposed user data)—along with a smaller number of positive cultures. Such missteps reflect the authors’ belief that “unconscious companies and organizations pay when their leaders’ thoughts and actions are corrupted by greed, self-indulgence, neglect, bad decision-making, arrogance and plain old stupidity.” The remainder of the book lays out the fundamentals of a positive culture, relying largely on concepts used by the authors’ the San Diego-based firm, CRI Global CAPS, which they plug frequently. Those concepts include the “Culture Spectrum” (a four-quadrant analysis of corporate cultures); “The Five Ps of Culture” (“Purpose,” “Principles,” “People,” “Processes,” and “Performance,” each covered in a separate chapter); and a “Culture Playbook,” a term the authors always italicize. The playbook is perhaps the most intriguing element; it uses the Five Ps to build “a roadmap for managing risk,” with an assessment of the organization’s culture as a first step. The book closes with “A Leader’s List of Conscious Business Principles,” 22 tips and observations that include “Encourage people to carry the message to the top, regardless of whether they bear good news or bad news.” Recommendations like “Share the credit when you succeed, but not the blame when you fail” may be overfamiliar to avid readers of guides for managers, but others may see them as needed reminders of the basics of good business practice.
Sound—if self-promotional—advice on creating a sturdy organizational culture.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9835032-7-9
Page Count: 217
Publisher: Blue Carriage Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2020
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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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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