A likable and engagingly presented program for simplifying approaches to life.
A wide-ranging guide focuses on the basics of business and life.
A great number of business-oriented self-help books, Contento notes at the beginning of his own work, tend to aim advice at the small percentage of managers who have already figured out the fundamentals of corporate culture and advancement. He intends his own manual to address the great majority of people who perhaps haven’t grasped quite so much. His guide, he contends, is not only for managers who have become indifferent or burned out, but also for the unemployed adolescent dreaming of success and the recent business graduate looking for a job. The precepts he lays out for such readers are the opposite of the multilayered complexity that’s common in other business motivation books—he believes that the key to success in business and life is to “deliver simplicity.” He proceeds to apply this basic idea to many different practical aspects of working life, always keeping things very direct and straightforward. “Success is positive; failure is negative. Simplicity is positive; complexity is negative,” he writes in one such passage. “Your job is to be positive and to deliver simplicity. By telling your boss you ‘can’t’ do something, you’re introducing complexity into her life.” He gives in-depth coverage to subjects that many of his readers may mistakenly consider obvious or self-evident, things like productivity, mentoring, networking, and punctuality. Contento is a very engaging writer, and he rounds off each of his fast-paced chapters with convenient summaries. His decision to stir in ample stories from his own experiences adds a palpable sense of unguarded authenticity to what are, after all, reductively simple observations about personal responsibility. Readers need not be planning careers as entrepreneurs to find a great many worthwhile reminders in these pages.
A likable and engagingly presented program for simplifying approaches to life.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-228-84216-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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