A modern leadership toolkit that hits some familiar notes.
A holistic guide to self-awareness and authentic leadership for women.
Gujrathi, a biotech entrepreneur and executive, offers strategies for overcoming self-doubt and navigating workplace challenges in this candid book. She defines “The Mirror Effect” as what happens when people reflect back one’s strengths and potential. The first part of the book focuses on internal work; the author discusses how to confront fear, insecurity, doubt, and shame, and offers techniques for defusing triggers. She unpacks four harmful work archetypes (the People-pleaser, the Impostor, the Bitch Boss, and the Micromanager) and advises adopting mantras and setting boundaries. The book’s second part focuses externally on organizational culture. Gujrathi identifies toxic workplace traits, such as cutthroat competition and gaslighting, and offers advice on how to protect and prioritize oneself. She introduces archetypes of “wounded people” in the workplace, including Tyrants, Rivals, and Deceivers, and offers strategies to respond to them. This section also addresses perception, biases, and finding work environments that align with your values. The book’s third part presents strategies for long-term growth, beginning with building a “personal board of directors” composed of mentors, role models, and subject-matter experts who can help make professional dreams a reality. The author also offers advice on negotiating a fair salary, regulating the nervous system, and tending to self-care. She concludes with a call to action for readers to “spread [their] wings and fly.” Gujrathi brings lived experience as both a woman of color and a C-suite insider to this step-by-step guide for transformation. She inspires introspection with probing questions like “Do you show yourself the same compassion you show the people you love?” She effectively illustrates her concepts with real-life anecdotes and examples of companies that excel in leadership, such as Patagonia, which has implemented its “Let My People Go Surfing” policy. However, some of the author’s suggestions, such as taking up journaling and yoga, are echoed in many other books within the self-help genre. Others, like “When you feel anxiety rising during a meeting, discreetly place one hand on your heart while continuing the conversation,” seem well-intentioned but may be impractical in corporate settings.
A modern leadership toolkit that hits some familiar notes.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798891385955
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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