A readable, well-researched work on the factors that make teams succeed.
A business book offers a look at group dynamics in the workplace and beyond.
As Stewart points out in this compact study, humans are hard-wired to work in groups despite instinctively valuing their individuality. Striking this balance can be tricky, as the author acknowledges. When people lose their sense of self and become subsumed in a group, they compensate with greater differentiation. But if they’re too different, they feel an increased desire to belong. “It is a delicate equilibrium,” Stewart writes, and he’s organized his book into a series of maxims and examples designed to help readers in the business world achieve that balance. The examples range from astronauts to executives, with special detail and affection reserved for the world of professional sports, which the author uses to illustrate key rules of group dynamics. “Businesses are following the sports world’s lead by looking at how an individual impacts the team,” he writes. “If someone does not have the best individual performance metrics, yet the team still performs better when they are there, then the person is valuable for team chemistry.” In all of the scenarios he examines, Stewart stresses personality as strongly as he emphasizes functionality, and he takes a hard look at how to assess such a variable: “Your identity comes from the stories you tell yourself daily and is an unreliable indicator of personality.” Throughout the book, the author is a smoothly personable narrator, easily breaking down the wide-ranging research he’s done into clear summaries and knowing applications. His conclusions can sometimes be off-puttingly cold (when he writes admiringly about the cooperation found in ant colonies, for instance, every corporate drone will feel a bit nervous). But his clarity on the subject of what makes teams work well (and what doesn’t) is sharply thought-provoking.
A readable, well-researched work on the factors that make teams succeed.Pub Date: Dec. 25, 2021
ISBN: 979-8794201505
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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