cover image Egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Our Most Expensive Liability)

Egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Our Most Expensive Liability)

Steve Smith, David Marcum, . . Fireside, $25 (256pp) ISBN 978-1-4165-3323-8

In this flawed, uneasy mix of business analysis and psychological study, business consultants Marcum and Smith offer a defense of ego and its broadly misunderstood counterpart, humility, along with a discussion of how to maneuver ego to effectively encourage individual talent and sound business practice. Though the very word has negative connotations, the authors see ego as a vital asset to business growth. Employees who handle ego effectively are more confident, assertive and willing to listen to others and thus more equipped to compete and excel. Those who don’t are forced to work from a place of defensiveness and an oversensitivity to outside judgment. Marcum and Smith effectively demonstrate the benefits of successful ego management in situations as varied as Fred Rogers’s fight to keep government funding for PBS and Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, but their plans for ego management in the workplace are vague, confusingly organized and unspecific. The authors have backgrounds in business and psychology, but skim too swiftly over both to be satisfying on either level. Without firm strategy, this is a magazine article stretched to book length, neither informative nor particularly entertaining. (Sept.)