Sensible yet overly familiar advice for potential leaders.
A collection of encouraging advice from the former commander of U.S. Special Operations Forces.
Books teaching leadership are typically thin, inspirational, packed with pithy anecdotes, and have—this being an overpopulated genre—a memorable yet gimmicky title (How To Win Friends and Influence People, Think Like a Horse, The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan, etc.). This one fits the bill. As he shows, McRaven is the bullfrog, “the longest-serving frogman and Navy SEAL on active duty.” The bestselling author of Make Your Bed, Sea Stories, and The Hero Code, McRaven begins by warning that good leadership is difficult but not complicated. “In its simplest form,” he writes, “leadership is ‘accomplishing a task with the people and resources you have while maintaining the integrity of your institution.’ A good leader knows both how to inspire the men and women that work for them and how to manage the people and resources necessary to complete the task. But leadership is not just about getting the job done. It is also about maintaining or advancing the reputation of your institution.” It’s a reasonable but hardly groundbreaking, repetitious definition. Each chapter begins with a pithy quote (“A Shepherd Should Smell Like His Sheep”) followed by an incident from military history that illustrates how to get the job done or an anecdote from the author’s life that recounts a slip-up, after which he learned an important lesson. All end with three succinct rules summarizing the lesson—e.g., “A. Have a vision that says what you are doing….B. Have a strategy that tells how you are going to do it….C. Have a plan that shows who is responsible.” Although mostly directed at the business community, McRaven’s knowledge owes a great deal to his military background—“Run to the sound of the guns,” “no plan survives first contact with the enemy”—but few readers will miss his points because they have been made so often by other writers.
Sensible yet overly familiar advice for potential leaders.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781538707944
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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