A satisfying handbook for future moguls.
A readable study of the habits of mind of successful corporate leaders.
Ever since In Search of Excellence was released in 1982, there’s been a surge of books, good and bad, on how to run businesses better. Falling toward the good-to-middling part of the spectrum, this book takes a familiar tack: interview CEOs (refreshingly, not just the usual suspects), find out what makes them tick, and formulate a set of maxims and observations: “the best CEOs…are exceptional futurists,” for instance, studying the commercial landscape closely and even obsessively to forecast trends and shifts. “Doing so enables them to place bets before these trends become conventional wisdom and to maintain conviction when others inevitably criticize their choices,” write the authors, who worked from a list of some 2,000 CEOs and narrowed it to exclude leaders with terms of fewer than six years. Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill increased Alcoa’s revenues fivefold during his tenure as CEO not just by pushing the company’s products, but by giving employees a sense of ownership and “creating a habit of excellence.” Brad Smith of Intuit did much the same thing by broadcasting meetings with his dozen-odd direct reports to the “top 400 leaders in the company,” giving them an opportunity to buy into the organizational culture and goals of the firm. Gail Kelly, former CEO of Westpac, emphasizes the importance of building strong relationships with the company’s board members, especially its chair, while many other leaders struggle to balance time spent within the company and with external stakeholders, with an average of about 30% spent on the latter, “but with a high standard deviation.” Several leaders insist that work can’t be all-consuming but also that leadership has to center on things that can be controlled, especially where one devotes time and effort. The authors include practical worksheets and bios of the contributors, which include the heads of Mastercard, General Motors, and Duke Energy.
A satisfying handbook for future moguls.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982179-67-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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