A well-considered business primer with feeling.
An entrepreneur shares his guiding principles in this debut.
The CEO of a facilities management firm, Kurland adopted the mantra “Be Better” when he launched his company in 2014. He embedded that notion into the corporate culture, distilling it into 13 principles that he discusses chapter by chapter. His goal, writes Kurland, is to help the reader “lead with emotional intelligence.” The principles themselves are far from unique; for example, “Be Fearless,” “Be Purposeful,” and “Be Inspiring” aren’t exactly breakthrough exhortations. As Kurland admits in the introduction, the content “may seem like common sense,” and the result is a book that is clearly geared to those who are thinking about or just starting a business. Still, Kurland puts a positive spin on each principle, writing with an enthusiasm that is infectious. His candid advice, based on his own experience, is steeped in practical wisdom. “Following up is both an often-forgotten activity and the primary reason why business deals fall through,” he counsels in the first chapter. “Understanding which of your tasks need to be delegated is the initial step in figuring out who you should hire first,” he advises in a principle he terms “Be People-Centric.” Regarding purpose, Kurland proclaims, “The single most important thing you can do as a business owner and CEO is to define the core values of your company.” While some readers may regard these as platitudes, such statements have intrinsic value for budding entrepreneurs who doubtlessly need the most basic form of guidance. Kurland’s writing style is personal and direct; the brief chapters and clearly marked subsections facilitate scanning; and the plentiful tips throughout the book lend themselves to highlighting and notations. Ever the marketer, Kurland cleverly wraps up each chapter/principle by referencing a specific relevant episode of his podcast series. Kurland’s aim to build a cadre of caring business owners may be best expressed by these thoughts in the final chapter: “Be authentic. Be vulnerable. Be gentle when you’re delivering hard messages. Be kind.”
A well-considered business primer with feeling.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2972-1
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2022
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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