A carefully assembled, thorough book that should be required reading for corporate leaders.
Former Secretary of State Rice (Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom, 2017, etc.) and Zegart (Eyes on Spies: Congress and the United States Intelligence Community, 2011, etc.), both Stanford political scientists, describe how political risk can affect businesses—and what to do about it.
SeaWorld is devastated by online social activism over its mistreatment of killer whales. Sony Entertainment loses trade secrets to hackers. Kazakhstan becomes independent, and Chevron faces a nightmare over an oil-and-gas concession in the dissolving Soviet Republic. Such are the new dangers—from geopolitics to cyberthreats and terrorism—facing corporations in the turbulent global landscape of “unprecedented” economic opportunities and political risks of the past 30 years. During this period, societal changes—e.g., supply chain innovations, the communications revolution, and post–Cold War politics—have given rise to potentially harmful actions by individuals with cellphones, local officials using city ordinances, terrorists using truck bombs, and the U.N. imposing sanctions. Now, write the authors, “anyone armed with a cell phone or a Twitter or Facebook account can create political risks.” Based on a Stanford seminar taught by the authors, the book examines the “notoriously difficult” job of managing the countless political risks that businesses face. Some firms excel, notably FedEx, Marriott, Disney, and the Lego Group as well as many cruise lines, chemical companies, law firms, tech companies, and others. Some have even created “mini-CIAs.” Drawing on research, interviews, and their own experiences, Rice and Zegart provide detailed examples of companies that have succeeded or failed in meeting the new challenges and outline key ways to approach risks: Get good information. Build trusting relationships. Analyze continually. Integrate political risk analysis into business decision-making. As the authors write in closing, “the most effective organizations have three big things in common: They take political risk seriously, they approach it systematically, and they lead from the top.”
A carefully assembled, thorough book that should be required reading for corporate leaders.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4235-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
© 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.
