A persuasive case for bringing soldiering lessons into the boardroom.
Berry, a U.S. Army veteran, applies his military training to running a business in this guide.
The author, CEO of a law firm, advises readers on how to apply concepts and principles from military life to civilian business in this book, which shares its title with Berry’s podcast. It’s divided into three sections: “Survive,” “Thrive,” and “Dominate.” Each themed section combines military practices, including the buddy system, moving in cadence, adhering to strict standards, and making good use of downtime, with common business scenarios to create practical and actionable applications. Some concepts—such as that leaders should spend one-third of the allotted time planning, so that their subordinates can spend the other two-thirds executing—are easy to apply directly; others head into metaphorical terrain, as when he uses procedures for handling a malfunctioning machine gun to make a point about maintaining momentum. Berry, who served in the U.S. military in Bosnia and Iraq, is particularly insightful in explaining how aspects of a sergeant’s role can be applied to the corporate world—a topic that reappears in many contexts throughout the book. This guide is aimed primarily at other military veterans; Berry occasionally asks readers to remember elements of their military training or barracks life. However, it will also be accessible to those who have no firsthand knowledge of boot camp or discharge paperwork. Readers who are skeptical of the educational value of doing pushups to the point of collapse may not share the author’s positivity regarding the rigors of boot camp, but they may also find his application of the Army’s assessment process to corporate performance reviews to be very worthwhile. Berry is a persuasive writer, combining an obvious enthusiasm for his thesis with well-reasoned, highly readable arguments, illustrated with numerous anecdotes. The book covers some material that regular readers of business books will find familiar, but it does so with fresh insights that make it a useful addition to the genre.
A persuasive case for bringing soldiering lessons into the boardroom.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2024
ISBN: 9798990533509
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Sabrequill Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2024
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
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
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