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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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