Respectful of both the old and the new cultures, rich in pro forma details and insider gossip alike, and likely to be...
Pulitzer Prize–winning business reporter Anders (Health Against Wealth, 1996, etc.) crafts a highly readable account of the clash of cultures, gender, and styles that accompanied the changing of the guard at a leading computer manufacturer.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who founded their company in 1938 in a Palo Alto garage, famously ran the enterprise as a family operation; benevolent and paternalistic, they boosted profits the old-fashioned way by raising prices, trimming costs, and growing only as the market allowed. The market responded generously: “Every decade, HP’s sales, profits, and stock price climbed another fourfold or more. . . . The cumulative effect was a company with more than $30 billion a year in sales by the mid-1990s, more than 100,000 employees, and no obvious limits to its growth.” Yet HP’s management was also top-heavy and unresponsive; the company was badly prepared for the economic downturn and collapse of the tech market at the end of the ’90s. Enter vivacious, tough-as-nails Carly Fiorina, a go-getter who made Lucent a major player during the boom. In 1999, HP’s board of directors entrusted her with the job of reorganizing the company and returning it to market dominance. This female outsider from the East Coast quickly ran afoul of entrenched interests within the company, but just as quickly won allies among the board and employees alike. She was less successful, Anders writes, in the long and bloody battle to wed HP to Compaq, a faltering manufacturer whose assimilation she reckoned would make HP the biggest, baddest company on the block. The jury’s still out on that, as Anders allows, but Fiorina squeaked by with a narrow victory in one of the most bitter and heavily publicized intracorporate squabbles in memory, displaying an almost frightening tenacity that should serve HP well.
Respectful of both the old and the new cultures, rich in pro forma details and insider gossip alike, and likely to be required airplane reading in business class.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-59184-003-1
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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
IN THE NEWS
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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