A concise celebration of the power of storytelling, pleasantly free of didacticism.
A debut marketing treatise on the benefits of crafting a compelling narrative for one’s business.
In these pages, marketing expert Riemer—an executive in residence at the University of California, Berkeley’s Hass School of Business—imagines how executives might work to better package and sell their startup story. The work opens with former CNN president Jon Klein’s foreword, in which he says that Reimer’s methodology helped him raise $4 million for his own startup. Riemer then offers his own account of a life of writing and storytelling. What will strike readers from the outset is the author’s dedication to colloquial, lively prose—a business-writing style that’s refreshingly stripped of tech jargon and focused not on a “two-sided market” of buyers and sellers, but rather on a “love story” that can lead to everyone living happily ever after. He divides the book into three sections—“How to Build a Great Story,” “How to Tell a Compelling Story,” and “How to Level-Up Your Story”—and provides concrete examples of how companies adapt to rapidly shifting markets and other unexpected occurrences, including the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, he keeps his focus on how a business tells its story. In the first section, for example, Riemer discusses the presentation of Facebook in the 2010 film The Social Network and the ways that screenwriters structure Pixar films, and incorporates sample storyboards that entrepreneurs can use to map out their ideas. In the second part, Riemer clearly discusses how corporate luminaries, such as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, reduced complex ideas into compelling narratives, building bonds between their companies and would-be customers. The work is lucid and tightly written, clocking in at fewer than 200 pages with little extraneous detail—a structural decision that befits the book’s overarching themes. In the closing chapters, Riemer challenges readers to understand that their story “is never truly finished” and that they should continue to work on an innovative narrative for customers to follow.
A concise celebration of the power of storytelling, pleasantly free of didacticism.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63299-469-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2022
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
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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