A focused and coherent look at how character traits shape corporate leadership.
Snyder sounds the call for businesses to place character at the heart of their strategies.
In this debut business book, the author uses the metaphor of an arch, with its pairs of evenly matched stones balancing each other to support a functioning structure, to describe the behavioral and personality traits necessary to lead a thriving company (“what matters most for leaders and managers in a company is not their skills, but their character”). Snyder argues that five pairs of traits (knowledge and wisdom, courage and prudence, ambition and integrity, perseverance and humility, independence and empathy) should be balanced both within the individual person and, more crucially, across the entire leadership team. Drawing on his experience as a consultant brought in to advise struggling companies, the author offers cautionary tales and success stories to support his argument. The book’s first half explores the ten traits in detail; the second half directs readers to assess their own and their teams’ arches (using a tool on a companion website) and to develop the awareness that will allow them to compensate for weaker traits, avoid pitfalls, and build a group of leaders whose strengths and weaknesses work in concert. Snyder is a thoughtful writer with a wealth of relevant professional experience, and the book is an engaging read that concretely illustrates the theory Snyder proposes. (Readers may wish the author had taken more than two paragraphs to explore the grocery chain H-E-B’s successful pandemic response—they will surely appreciate the more detailed chapter on managing conflict that uses several specific examples to illustrate how leaders have succeeded and failed at balancing their 10 traits.) Like the arch the author describes, the book has a few weak points—for instance, the way Snyder uses “independence” and “empathy” in the context of decision-making is similar to but distinct from their common interpersonal uses, which makes the pairing somewhat less effective. Still, such flaws are more than compensated for by the text’s many strengths.
A focused and coherent look at how character traits shape corporate leadership.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9798994147658
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Precocity Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 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
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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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