A CEO’s readable and heartwarming story of building beds with love.
Ryde presents a business memoir promoting loving customer service.
In his nonfiction debut, the author, the fifth-generation CEO of the luxury bed manufacturer Hästens, immediately signals his intention to write an unconventional memoir about his experience running his company; he asks whether or not a business can really be founded on love, and then answers “yes.” Ryde views the purpose of his company as spreading “love, joy, peace, and abundance.” Writing about the company, which has its headquarters and warehouses in Köping, Sweden, Ryde takes readers on a tour of Hästens' 171-year history, in which the author’s ancestors first stuffed beds with horsetail hair (the company’s founders traveled to Egypt in search of the finest Arabian specimens). He traces the company’s fortunes all the way to the present, including his own initiatives since 1988 to boost its annual profits. “After I had been working at Hästens for a year or two,” he writes in the affectionate tone that characterizes the whole book, “my aunties came to me and told me how grateful they were that I was there, working to revive the company.” From these stories, he expands on a general philosophy of kindness and empathy that extends to both employees and customers. Ryde is a tremendously charismatic presence on the page, bursting with a cheerfulness that makes his anecdotes and precepts sound extremely winning. But readers (especially those working in retail or entrepreneurial spaces themselves) will immediately spot the Achilles heel of Ryde’s viewpoint: Hästens’ beds can cost many thousands of dollars apiece and are made with slow, elaborate, individual care—circumstances which tend to make it easier to lavish love on every customer. But his heart’s in the right place, and readers will appreciate his storytelling skills.
A CEO’s readable and heartwarming story of building beds with love.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781637631973
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forefront Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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