A knowledgeable and convincing call to view SDG and ESG initiatives as profitable.
Two forward-thinking logistics experts weigh in on environmentally and economically responsible leadership strategies in this nonfiction debut.
Wood and Nakazawa offer a vision of better, more responsible corporate leadership that, they assert, is both realistic and good for the bottom line: “If they choose to, corporations and governments can utilize resources without damaging the environment,” they write. “They can find ways to add value to the world while being extraordinarily profitable.” The authors take as their starting point the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), pointing out that in the modern era, investors are becoming more sophisticated when it comes to environmental goals, as well as concepts such as gender equality, antipoverty, and antihunger initiatives. Those who ignore such issues may actually do damage to their companies, they point out, by creating “social problems, management problems, and even legal problems and lawsuits from employees.” The authors, who in 2019 co-founded Smart Vision Logistics,draw on their experiences advising other companies to examine, in part, the ways that “environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals” can affect future performance. To aid the formulation of such strategies, Wood and Nakazawa present researched chapters, key takeaways, and “guided reflections” such as “How are you currently demonstrating to investors that your business is not only in the business of making outsized profits, but is also adding value to society?” The authors infuse most of their discussion with an infectious enthusiasm, urging their readers to see SDGs not as a burden but as a series of opportunities: “For while a company doesn’t have to solve the world’s problems, it’s time to consider that solving someof them is the right business strategy,” as it can not only attract investors who want the same goals, but also reduce risks of scandals. Their narrative can sometimes take surprising turns, as when they digress about the “very authoritarian” corporate environment of Japan, comparing the system to China’s. However, the bulk of the book deals effectively and very knowledgeably with fundamental changes in the business world.
A knowledgeable and convincing call to view SDG and ESG initiatives as profitable.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781544540948
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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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