Relevant, grounded, and often humorous insights for the conflict-averse to consider.
Graves offers strategies designed to solve conflicts that could arise on the job.
Have you ever struggled with difficult situations or people at your workplace? The answer is likely yes, and this guide, covering a wide array of work-related challenges and offering possible resolutions, can help. Not a fan of conflict himself, the polite, raised-in-the-South author’s life changed when he replaced the concept of niceness, a “candy-coated emptiness,” with the tougher and more productive principle of kindness that underlies this book. First, Graves gives general strategies for dealing with dissent, like Hanlon’s razor (choosing to not assume others’ bad intentions) and “cranky conclusions” (practicing empathy). Subsequent chapters explore multiple themes, using conflict between real-life individuals as a starting point and working toward mutual understanding between them. Some of the topics covered include lying and gaslighting, conflicts that arise when working remotely, microaggressions, pushy people, safety at the workplace, and pay inequality. Each chapter is set up as a problem with a solution and includes things to look out for, various charts and graphs, and final thoughts. Graves’ book, though clear and organized, courts monotony with the repetitive format, but the author strategically avoids this pitfall—each section has unique and tailored information. (In “People Losing Control,” Graves discusses amygdala hijacks and diagrams the grounding practice of “box breathing,” while “Understanding Cultural Dynamics” features tables comparing the individualist and collectivist philosophies of different cultures, stereotypes at work, and assertive versus collaborative mindsets.) The use of humor helps; Graves renamed individuals in his book after horror movie characters, and, in a chapter regarding forgiveness, he suggests using a brulee torch on a burn letter for “extra flair.” Taking a realistic approach, Graves does not neatly resolve all the situations he details: In “Mediating with Multiple People,” engineering lead Vicaria is ultimately blamed for a botched app rollout when the CEO mediator sides with product manager Donald, the CEO’s personal friend. Yet even unsuccessful conclusions are instructive as the author reimagines the conversations and leads readers down alternative paths. A helpful alphabetical index is included at the book’s end.
Relevant, grounded, and often humorous insights for the conflict-averse to consider.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781959029113
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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