A comprehensive, rigorous, and friendly guide to transforming organizations.
Bondareva, the founder and CEO of consultancy Vivit Worldwide, explores the many factors involved in leading organizations through transformative change.
This “trail guide for change-makers” focuses on fostering transformative change by increasing effectiveness, rather than pursuing incremental change by improving efficiency: “Incremental change fine-tunes the system while transformation recasts it, fundamentally changing the rules, structures, systems, skills, and processes.” She views this sort of change-making as a vocation that has lacked the definition and structure of an established professional discipline, and this book is intended to provide that framework, arguing for a process of “change design” that comes before and goes beyond the better-known work of change management. Using concrete examples from her personal experience, she breaks the process into six key stages: “Finding Your Purpose,” “Identifying the Idea,” “Vetting the Idea,” “Creating Change” (the most substantial section), “Getting Yourself Ready,” and “Exit.” Bondareva covers various modes of change-making (advocacy, supporting others, intrapreneurship, and entrepreneurship), 10 “megatrends” that offer opportunities for meaningful change (“In a world seemingly run by technology, we are hungry for solutions that honor our humanity and deliver more than a modicum of compassion,” she notes at one point), risk assessment, getting funding and support, implementation, and more. The author presents familiar concepts in fresh ways; for example, she defines risk assessment as confidence versus trepidation, and transformation as a current state versus a future state. She also provides useful exercises, strategies, and tips for everything from preparing financials and presentations to gauging impact and managing stress relief. In addition, Bondareva strongly emphasizes the importance of seeing other people’s points of view. Despite some repetition, the author’s style is clear and direct, using simple analogies, examples, and occasional charts and diagrams to explain potentially difficult concepts. Her passion for her subject is obvious as she frankly presents the challenges of trying to change the status quo while also encouraging readers to overcome such obstacles. The final section (“What Now?”) sums up the book’s main ideas and compiles several exercises into a “Change-Maker’s Checklist.”
A comprehensive, rigorous, and friendly guide to transforming organizations.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9798865487982
Page Count: 407
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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