A clear, valuable, and vigorous guide to making battle-worthy business plans.
Singh’s manual offers a blueprint for taking corporate strategizing to the next level.
Drawing on his 25 years as a business consultant, Singh lays out his view of incorporating “war gaming” into the world of corporate decision-making, contrasting this approach with the normal ways that companies tend to evolve. As opposed to those regular, plodding ways, war gaming is a “360-degree external assessment” of a corporation’s needs. Instead of the typical inward-directed analyses many businesses tend to use, “War gaming gives you an understanding of your external environment: your customers and their value drivers; your competition and, even better, all the other stakeholders in your marketplace (regulatory government agencies, supply chains) which are usually ignored in traditional planning.” War gaming is about far more than simply going along with the crowd or conducting business as usual, Singh asserts; it’s about doing, not just thinking about acting, and therefore becomes an effective tool for dealing with situations when normal strategizing doesn’t work. Singh provides a detailed overview for developing the strategic element of war gaming (What will an industry look like in the short and long term?), the operational facet (How do corporate leaders define the game they’re playing?), and the tactical component (What product capabilities and plans are in place?). While the author illustrates these concepts with plenty of numbered points and graphics, the book’s main strength is his vividly straightforward prose, tempered by his own experiences and full of examples involving famous companies such as Boeing and Facebook. He’s very clear on the advantages of war gaming, and he delivers insights into tactics that will be strong enough to handle the changes normal strategies can’t predict. The best approach, Singh tells readers, is to respect the competition: “Winning isn’t about having the most resources; it’s about resourcefulness.” He advocates forming a “Briefing Book” for these kinds of war games, and his own manual will serve quite well in that role for corporate leaders.
A clear, valuable, and vigorous guide to making battle-worthy business plans.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798887503240
Page Count: 232
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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