A thoughtful, concise, and practical guide to commercial innovation.
Chanoff, Furst, Sabbah, and Wegman offer a new interpretation of innovation—and a more systematic way to approach it—in this nonfiction work.
Innovation is not the same as mere invention, aver the authors; while the latter could be a mere “flash in the pan,” the former always precipitates a substantive and lasting shift in human behavior and will “become embedded in the world outside the innovator’s head.” For this to happen, the innovator must satisfy a profound desire on the part of the prospective user. “Successful innovation also must connect with the deep selves, the motivations, the pride, validation, ambition, et cetera of the people for whom the innovation is intended.” The authors devote this analytically rigorous text to an assessment of this hunger, what they call “authentic demand,” something that’s not reducible to either a rational calculation or a frenzied response to fancy marketing or sweeping trends. Authentic demand arises when the consumer considers the lack of a product to be a problem, “almost as a violation of something important.” This means that consumers will not be able to forgo products that so obviously and seamlessly make sense in their lives. The authors, all of whom have extensive business and academic experience with innovation, describe a “deliberate methodology” for finding that elusive authentic demand, and they provide the means for diagramming various situations to locate it. Some of the ground they cover is a stale rehashing of the business book genre’s shopworn tropes—the discussions of confirmation bias and creating a culture of “radical candor” seem perfunctory and obligatory. Still, the book is both surprisingly original and practically oriented and should be genuinely helpful to anyone looking to clarify what innovation is—and how to harness it.
A thoughtful, concise, and practical guide to commercial innovation.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781523005703
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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