A tangible, motivational life-planning approach with useful examples.
An organizational psychologist provides tools and insights to achieving professional and personal happiness in this debut self-development guide.
Schiemann (co-author: The Rise of HR, 2015, etc.), the founder and principal of Metrus Group, says that his management consulting firm’s work over 25 years has “led us to the concept of fulfillment as a critical quality” that people may achieve with “a plan that brings out the best in themselves.” In this book, “intended not for my academic colleagues but for practical application by readers like you,” Schiemann discusses “ACE,” which he sees as the guiding acronym for achieving fulfillment: one thinks about one’s “Alignment” by creating life goals, pursues the “Capabilities” that one needs to achieve them, and makes choices that bring about continuous “Engagement.” He then provides an array of flowcharts and tracking tools by which people may pinpoint and make progress on said life goals, including mapping out steppingstones, or “lighthouse goals,” to reach larger objectives (such as doing well on the LSATs in order to get into law school and then become a lawyer). Schiemann also shares his own personal story about struggling to focus and sketches out the life maps of both fictional and real people. The latter includes a woman who responded with passion and power to her pancreatic cancer diagnosis; she served as Schiemann’s key inspiration in developing this book. In this guide, the author effectively widens the lens of HR–type planning tools to serve a larger context. His advice to take time to specifically map out one’s goals, with specific targets and measures, is indeed practical, applicable advice, and it stands in contrast to the fuzzy positivity found in many happiness-oriented tomes. Although some readers may balk at having to fill out the several trackers provided here, it’s clear that such homework may be beneficial to anyone seeking to assess his or her work/life balance. Schiemann’s use of life stories, including his own, also enlivens what could have been a dry, prescriptive text.
A tangible, motivational life-planning approach with useful examples.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-944962-22-7
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Secant Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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