An intriguing—yet not universally applicable—look at what recording artists can teach us about innovation.
Connecting the dots between music and entrepreneurial inspiration.
How can music teach us—or at least teach musicians—about business innovation? That’s the question posed by Panay, the senior vice president for global strategy and innovation at Berklee College of Music, and Hendrix, global design director of design and innovation at the IDEO consultancy group. The authors chronicle their discussions with artists and entrepreneurs about qualities that both groups share. Among the subjects are some heavy hitters. Justin Timberlake lays down his guiding principle on experimentation: “I have only one rule in the studio, and it’s this: dare to suck. You may have a great idea in your head as somebody’s playing a riff on the guitar. Don’t hold it in.” Interscope head Jimmy Iovine weighs in on the act of listening, which isn’t as simple as you might think, by way of Beats headphones and a famous ad featuring the NBA’s Kevin Garnett walking into a rival arena and drowning out the hostility with his Beats. Wilco bassist John Stirratt discusses Tourists, a Massachusetts hotel “created to bring strangers together around shared experiences.” Stirratt makes the musical connection tangible as he shouts out the Austin hotel that gave him the idea: “I have the same feeling checking into the San Jose as I do listening to a Miles Davis record for the fiftieth time….It’s a visceral experience, a feeling of possibility.” The book is strongest in the authors’ presentations of heady concepts in down-to-earth fashion. But what if you’re not a musician, and what if your brain doesn’t yield the same starbursts of creativity as the likes of Pharrell, Björk, and Imogen Heap? Some of these lessons may still apply to you, but others may be out of reach. Other luminaries in the text include Dr. Dre, Steve Vai, and T Bone Burnett, and a series of “Interludes” offer soundtracks to illuminate the lessons.
An intriguing—yet not universally applicable—look at what recording artists can teach us about innovation.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3058-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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