by Wendy Fraser ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2019
A usefully detailed and consistently upbeat strategy for fixing fractured work relationships.
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A writer explores the high business costs of damaged trust and offers a plan for repairing it.
“Unresolved trust violations fester and start to overwhelm minds and hearts,” Fraser writes in her nonfiction debut. “If people lose trust in others, it affects how work gets done and how people communicate, problem-solve, and interact.” After a brief grounding in the origins of trust in individual personal development, the author moves her discussion to the world of business. She points out that trust violations “carry more weight” than trust-building actions, emphasizing that a faulty trust environment can quickly spread like rot through a community. For 10 years, Fraser gathered trust-related responses from nearly 1,000 leaders, employees, and customers in a variety of organizations. In these pages, she not only presents some of these stories, but also breaks down the basic dynamics of how individuals behave in groups: how people perceive the purpose of their groups; how they see their own roles in the groups; and how they communicate with one another. After providing this basis, she notes the various small things that can create a toxic environment. These items will be familiar to everybody who’s ever worked in an office: the confusion caused by “soft” deadlines, the unending mix-ups associated with intraoffice emails, and sloppiness and buck-passing. The author then goes on to elaborate a step-by-step plan to repair the damages that can result. These steps mostly boil down to Conflict Resolution 101: dispassionately learn the facts, seek feedback from all involved, be patient, and explore new arrangements. What saves all this from being derivative is Fraser’s abiding optimism. This is not a book about finding and rooting out deficient employees. “Repairing trust takes courage and a mindset that human beings can evolve and change,” the author writes. This will be encouraging to everybody except the managers who have to deal with the genuine, irredeemable bad apples.
A usefully detailed and consistently upbeat strategy for fixing fractured work relationships.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-7109-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
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
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by Erin Meyer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2014
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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