Month: July 2019

Kenneth Blanchard, William Onchen, Jr., Hal Burrows “The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey”

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Just a couple of weeks ago, I knew nothing about The One Minute Manager until a colleague told me about a book he had just read. He mentioned that, in his opinion, as a manager, I was already following all four rules for “managing monkeys.” That piqued my curiosity, and I decided to figure out what kind of monkeys I was supposedly dealing with.

Ken Blanchard, a well-known author of management books, coined the term One Minute Manager in his book of the same name. By this term, he refers to a highly productive leader who follows some fairly simple rules. Blanchard’s first book, co-authored with Spencer Johnson, sold millions of copies and has been translated into nearly 40 languages worldwide. It kicked off a series under the same name, in which Blanchard, collaborating with various business authors, presents different productivity methods.

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Olga Gromyko “The Cyborg and His Forester”

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Olga Gromyko continues to write about the beloved world of the near future, where seemingly kind humans have learned to create cyborgs, but ultimately treat them worse than furniture. They look like humans, but they can be casually used to clear minefields.

The main difference in the new book “The Cyborg and His Forester” is that it’s the first novel without the characters from the main series. The setting is the same, the location has appeared before, and the main characters were introduced in a previous short story. However, the beloved team from “The Space Brain-Eater” is absent from this book.

This is both good and bad, in my opinion. It’s good because Olga took a step sideways and tried to develop the universe without relying on the endless adventures of the team. She partially did this in the previous book when she shifted focus from road adventures to the fate of intelligent cyborgs finally making their voices heard.

But it’s bad because the book turned out to be less interesting and colorful. There are fewer main characters, and only two protagonists. Their color is also different. This is the first book in the series where I caught myself losing interest while reading. The main story is a light detective plot. But it didn’t captivate me like the previous books. The detective aspect is very “light,” because the relationship between the characters clearly takes precedence over the detective line. But even the main characters sometimes became tiresome with their behavior. At times, it felt like a circus, with the protagonists acting like clowns. And they seemed exhausted by it, performing this number for the ten-thousandth time, but unable to stop—because it’s their job.

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Ha-Joon Chang “Economics: The User’s Guide”

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Lately, I’ve become increasingly interested in economics. It’s not that I want to become an economist, but market principles are useful in many areas. What’s especially interesting is that back when I was a student, I had no interest in economics at all. In fact, I failed my second-year exam miserably and had to retake it in August. But by the time of the retake, I knew the material inside out. Perhaps that’s when my gradual interest in reading about economics started.

The book Economics: The User’s Guide by Ha-Joon Chang came highly recommended to me by various platforms (“you might like this”) and colleagues alike. Supposedly, it covers everything. The book certainly has a strong marketing presence. The author is originally from South Korea but currently lives and teaches in Cambridge. He’s consulted for many well-known banks, and the president of Ecuador almost worships him.

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Lyudmila Petranovskaya “The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life”

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As an experienced father, I hadn’t heard of Lyudmila Petranovskaya. Turns out, my wife has known about her for a long time and reads her articles. I discovered her book on the recommendation of a colleague, a man. That’s when I learned that L. Petranovskaya is a well-known child psychologist in the modern world. And her book The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life introduced me to her as an author.

The book’s main message is to show that children always need their parents and that they seek support from them. However, they do this in different ways during different stages of life, which is why certain behaviors and “problems” manifest.

What really stood out from the first pages is that the author doesn’t try to present her opinion as the only correct one. She immediately states:

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