An intriguing but niche look at the business practices of state-affiliated Chinese businesses.
In this debut business memoir, Jenevein warns against the potential pitfalls of doing business with Chinese companies.
The author did business in China for over 20 years, working with the Communist Party of China to provide energy to “the cities, hinterlands, offices, and homes of the only nation that comes close to competing with the United States diplomatically, economically, militarily, [and] technologically.” Jenevein’s Texas-based company, Tang Energy Group, was founded to build and operate energy delivery systems in China, from gas-powered plants to wind farms. His dealings with the CPC and their state-owned conglomerates—which can throw their immense weight around in a manner no independent company can—have given him a unique insight into the way America’s rival superpower conducts business, from aggressive lawsuits to bugged conversations to the threat of hired assassins. Jenevein expounds on the Chinese business culture—which, in the absence of dependably enforced laws, relies heavily on established social networks—mining his own, not-always-successful track record for examples. The book is structured as a conversation between Jenevein and writer Steve Fiffer, who interviews Jenevein and occasionally adds insights of his own. Jenevein offers a fascinating look into the labyrinthian process of dealing with fundamentally secretive business partners: “You learn that the [People’s Liberation Army] skews topographic maps so foreigners—whether army personnel or wind farm developers—cannot make sense of them. Because frustration has boiled over and expressed itself effectively to your PRC counterparties, they have provided the key to de-skew the maps.” Much of the text focuses on a dispute between Jenevein and the Chinese aviation company AVIC, which Jenevein claims reneged on a deal to develop wind technology with Tang; it seems, at points, as though the purpose of the book is to let Jenevein settle scores as much as to offer advice. Those who find themselves in the rare position of making multimillion-dollar deals with Chinese corporations may find his account instructive, but it is difficult to imagine it attracting a wider audience.
An intriguing but niche look at the business practices of state-affiliated Chinese businesses.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781960865229
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Christmas Lake Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 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
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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