Part survival guide, part cautionary tale, a volume in which every aspiring entrepreneur should invest.
Accomplished attorney and author Sutton (Start Your Own Corporation, 2012, etc.) presents a second volume on how to build a well-protected business from the ground up.
If it seems like Sutton is leading a tour through every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare, it’s because the path to running a successful corporation is rife with pitfalls. Founder of Sutton Law Center and a Rich Dad’s Advisor series contributor, Sutton knows what can happen when entrepreneurs ignore proper bookkeeping and other corporate formalities. Hefty tax liabilities, expensive lawsuits and criminal investigations can doom a business. Rather than cower from the dangers, Sutton digs in with an us-versus-them attitude and explains how to build a “corporate veil” that will be difficult for outsiders to penetrate, whether they be sue-happy clients or overzealous creditors. Stuffed with legal concepts but remarkably easy to follow, the book traces the evolution of three fictitious businesses over a five-year period—an engineering firm, a beauty salon and a housesitting venture. These “case studies” illustrate the basics of personal asset protection and legal documentation. Topics include choosing a corporate entity, payroll taxes, annual filings, IRS audits and more. Options are laid out with brutal candor because the consequences can be grave. One imaginary entrepreneur loses $15,000 due to trademark infringement, and another is sentenced to prison following a dubious tax investigation. The narratives can be a bit over-the-top, but it’s forgivable because a skilled attorney will anticipate worst-case scenarios. Sutton casts a wide defensive net, even highlighting the risks posed by social media websites. Government agencies like the IRS and OSHA are viewed with suspicion, and entrepreneurs are urged to rise above bureaucracy by following the rules. Sutton makes no apologies for the tactics used by the wealthy; while he insists readers pay their taxes, he shows ways to legally reduce their liabilities. The timeline of the book is ambitious, since many startups are barely profitable after five years, but Sutton’s strategies can be applied regardless of scope.
Part survival guide, part cautionary tale, a volume in which every aspiring entrepreneur should invest.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1937832100
Page Count: 300
Publisher: BZK Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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