A brisk, enjoyable management manual to help CEOs develop “a bias for action.”
Canady offers a guide to perfecting a profitable business through better management.
In this nonfiction debut, the author, who’s the CEO of OTC Industrial Technologies and Arrowhead Engineered Products, breaks down the philosophy and practical elements of a solid “profitable growth operating system,” or PGOS. He writes that he learned the basics of leadership in the U.S. Navy; began his post-military career in the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) field; earned an MBA at the University of Chicago in the early 2000s; and joined an unnamed “global tech company” with the aim of rising to its upper echelons: “The fact that the company had urgent problems gave me a greater opportunity to climb faster and establish myself sooner,” he notes, quipping that “you can’t fall out of a basement.” He moved into private equity, where he repeatedly observed the wisdom of the Pareto principle, from which he takes the title of his book: “Just 20 percent of what you do or spend generates 80 percent of your revenue.” (He sardonically adds, “Don’t get too happy, though, because the other 80 percent of what you spend generates just 20 percent of your revenue.”) In a series of chapters liberally broken up with bullet points, key takeaways, and colored insets, Canady lays out the workings of the Pareto principle as it applies to everything from meetings to workflow. At every stage, he employs a pitch-perfect combination of common sense and wit, clearly informed by long experience. When discussing the essential need to simplify in business procedures, for instance, he notes that his own candidate for the greatest authority in that area would be the great naturalist writer Henry David Thoreau, although he admits that “you probably wouldn’t want him as a customer.” (“In fact,” he adds, “you probably couldn’t get him as a customer because he bought almost nothing from anybody.”) Canady not only effectively demonstrates that the 80/20 principle is “the single most important assumption” in management; he also entertains his readers at every step along the way.
A brisk, enjoyable management manual to help CEOs develop “a bias for action.”Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9798888242469
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
