A wide-ranging reconsideration of long-held ideas about doing business.
Business journalist Murray examines the growing idea of the socially conscious company.
When Bill Gates, “capitalism’s greatest victor,” argues that corporations should help improve the lives of people less fortunate than he, then you know that the worm has definitely turned. For generations, thanks to the hold that the economic ideas of Milton Friedman once exerted on business thinking, it was a tenet of market fundamentalism that the sole duty of a corporation was to maximize profits for its shareholders. But not long ago, as Murray meaningfully puts it, “capitalism got a second look.” One manifestation was a joint statement announced by the attendees at a 2016 conference, among them representatives of Ford, IBM, Siemens, and Dow Chemical, that capitalism needed “to do a better job demonstrating its value to society.” The Covid-19 pandemic has only sharpened that need, as workers leave unsatisfying jobs and as decision-making becomes increasingly decentralized such that managers are needed mostly to articulate corporate values and set goals. The flavors of this reenvisioned capitalism are many, Murray writes, including Whole Foods founder John Mackey’s “conscious capitalism,” Chase leader Jamie Dimon’s insistence on looking at big-picture issues such as diversity and inequality, and GM head Mary Barra’s climate change–oriented pledge to “eliminate all tailpipe emissions from new GM cars by 2035.” Murray isn’t exactly a cheerleader, but he offers positive news for those seeking to take part in this evolving market. As he writes, 75 million jobs will be eliminated by new technologies worldwide in 2022, but 133 million will be created—good reason, he adds, to insist that socially responsible companies help “reskill” their workers to meet changing times. He hammers on a few themes, such as the decline of shareholder supremacy, a time or two too often, but business readers will find plenty to ponder.
A wide-ranging reconsideration of long-held ideas about doing business.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-8908-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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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