A deeply personal and upbeat entrepreneurial manual.
In this guide, Frank offers insights into the pursuit of real estate investment, with a focus on building wealth for Black families.
In 1989, the author and her mother took over a successful real estate business founded by her father, who had established it in 1950 with only one single-family home. She now oversees hundreds of multifamily apartments and continues to expand the business with a vision of growing generational wealth. This book shares Frank’s financial advice, with which she aims to teach readers how to build their own wealth, despite institutional obstacles. Frank’s story begins with her parents, whom she defines as “fire starters”—people who ignite a flame for their future against the narrative that society has given them. She tells of how her father came to Seattle to build a business after leaving Detroit and its Jim Crow laws; she also references the success of her uncle, music legend Quincy Jones. Each chapter begins with an original poem by Frank and ends with a list of takeaways and action steps to help them put the author’s wisdom into practice. In these pages, readers can dive into the benefits of real estate investment, as well as her “R.E.A.L.” method—an acronym for a multistep process of researching, expanding one’s business, amplifying requests, and leveraging connections. Along the way, the author offers an inside look into what it’s like to be a landlord and run a family real estate business, particularly in Washington state and Arizona. Frank artfully blends her advice with discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, boldly speaking out against racism, sexism, and other prejudices that one may encounter while pursuing one’s full wealth potential. Ultimately, Frank encourages readers to hold a big financial picture in mind, envisioning a legacy of intergenerational wealth and philanthropy. This will be an empowering story that will provide inspiration to a wide range of readers, and particularly to Black families and entrepreneurs seeking to achieve their financial dreams. Although Frank’s advice is specific to real estate investment, readers interested in other wealth-building methods will also find motivation in this book’s vignettes.
A deeply personal and upbeat entrepreneurial manual.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781394198696
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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