A well-illustrated and wide-ranging new approach to large- and small-scale disruptions in the business world.
A guide to business and entrepreneurship designed for a world of accelerated change.
“The future does not exist today,” writes author, educator, and consultant Spitz, “so we have the opportunity to imagine it, shape it and navigate towards it.” In business, that navigation can be disrupted by any number of factors, from the infusion of new money to the cross-pollination of previously unrelated fields to new regulations to unpredictable outside shocks to the system (like the Covid-19 pandemic). Surveying all of these vectors of uncertainty, the author paraphrases inventor Charles Kettering by pointing out that everyone should be concerned about the future since we’re all going to be spending the rest of our lives there. Spitz analyzes several of these sorts of disruptions and proposes a plan for dealing with them: his “Disruptive Thinking Canvas,” which he describes as “a living process,” noting that “interpreting disruptions, scanning horizons and creating positive value doesn’t stop after you do it once.” The author outlines the Canvas in six steps: “Reframing disruptions,” “Scanning and mapping” (for anticipating possible disruptions), “Ideating” (“embrace new mindsets to harness uncertainty”), “Dissent and alignment,” “Decision-making and driving change,” and “Iterating” (“Apply changes, assess impacts, incorporate new information and utilize feedback”). Spitz, drawing on his own extensive experience as a business professional and on a wide array of outside sources (all carefully documented in the book’s notes), delves into all aspects of capitalizing on “the inherent flexibility of reversible decisions” in the face of uncertainty.
The text weaves all of this into a visually stimulating and interactive presentation, full of graphs, charts, insets, and bullet points. The author echoes many of the common odd narrative ticks of other business-motivation books, from ritualistic mentions of Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, who’s likened to Aristotle: “Thinking from first principles, he proved you can develop and manufacture commercially viable, cost-efficient rockets.” Putting these routine genuflections aside, Spitz has many thought-provoking concepts to share with aspiring entrepreneurs who might be worried about the next major disruption lurking where they least suspect it. The strongest theme running through the book is can-do optimism—the author’s confidence that uncertainty is something to be embraced and leveraged instead of dreaded is convincing. Being anticipatory does not require formal tools. Often, common sense, mindfulness and critical thinking will beat any tools (“Being in the world is being anticipatory”). Spitz is particularly compelling on the concept of the “metaruption,” which he describes as “a multidimensional family of systemic disruptions, including shifts in the notion of disruption itself.” These “metaruptions” defy all the rules, and here, as elsewhere, the author itemizes the opportunities that can accompany the “unparalleled messiness” of change. He brings a refreshing clarity to the discussion of all facets of disruption, from the deep causes to the long-term consequences, and though he sometimes burdens his prose with cliches (“While history may not repeat, it can rhyme”), the sheer energy of his presentation will give readers resistant to change plenty of stimulating new perspectives on its inevitability.
A well-illustrated and wide-ranging new approach to large- and small-scale disruptions in the business world.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781398616882
Page Count: 376
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 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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