An engrossing, perceptive, and insightful study.
Organizational psychologist Maylett and journalist Vandehey offer an examination of modern-day disengagement.
Touch screens on smartphones and tablets encourage people to “Swipe,” which the authors define more broadly as following “our natural impulse to progress to the next thing, and then the next, and the next.” As the team points out, Swiping behavior extends far beyond technological gadgets to virtually every area of human life. The authors have studied employee engagement for 20 years—researching, interviewing, surveying, and analyzing data—to produce a work that explores the psychology of disengaging. The goal of their research is to help readers finish what they start. The authors acknowledge that Swiping is akin to procrastinating, but it’s more about abruptly quitting a task rather than delaying it: “You almost certainly have your own list of unfinished frustrations….We know we’re capable of more, but we just can’t get there.” The book begins with an overview of the negatives associated with Swiping; the authors even identify eight types of Swipes, including “The Greener Grass Swipe,” a common characteristic of job-hoppers, and “The Impostor Syndrome Swipe,” in which someone who feels like a fraud bolts from an uncomfortable situation. A chapter on disengagement in the workplace is particularly edifying; it offers guidance for both managers and employees on how Swiping can “sabotage” the success of an organization or an individual. The use of an image of a “hamster wheel” in a subsequent chapter is an obvious but still effective way to depict the Swipe cycle; later, the authors provide a smart six-step process for exiting from said wheel.
Many of the authors’ astute observations over the course of this book will resonate with readers, and their assessment of technology is an especially compelling one. They write, for example, that “technology has created an unconscious expectation in a substantial fraction of the population that life is reality optional.…It’s the impulse that leads us to quit before we finish what we’ve begun.” Even more sobering is their view of today’s powerful apps: “We are developing an unconscious sense that we are entitled to have things work out, to have even the most fraught crisis resolve with the tap of an app.” Many examples the authors cite are taken from the business world and are directed toward managers or employees. However, Maylett and Vandehey do a fine job of relating the Swipe to many other aspects of daily life, and as a result, their work is likely to be relevant to a wide audience. Frequent sidebars inserted throughout expand on topics in useful ways; for example, “How Not To Swipe” segments offer helpful suggestions for avoiding the act of Swiping, while “Nerd Alert!” entries take a deeper dive into related scientific experiments and theories. At the close of the book, they aptly ponder what a Swipe-free world might be like: “Imagine the epic flood of potential that would be unleashed if just a fraction of us stopped Swiping and finished what we started.”
An engrossing, perceptive, and insightful study.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781645435532
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2023
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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