For business readers, this insider’s tale informs and entertains.
A retired CEO weaves memoir, management philosophy, and career advice in this well-crafted debut.
MacDonald, a specialist in corporate real estate, draws the title from his capstone assignment—rescuing Australia’s largest property company, Investa, from collapse during the global financial crisis. His saga began in 2008, six months after Morgan Stanley took Investa private in an ill-timed, highly leveraged $6.5 billion buyout. He accepted a six-month stint in Australia that turned into five years of organizational scrambling and nick-of-time refinancing to avoid insolvency. He saved the company but lost his marriage. Alternating chapters backfill his biography, connecting decisions at Investa with lessons from his hardscrabble childhood, teenage factory jobs, college struggles, military service, and “globe-trotting” rise to the boardroom. MacDonald turns the same eye for detail that scrutinized balance sheets to rendering scenes. The volume of tangential, personal details could have shrunk his potential readership to his grandchildren, but he is an adept storyteller with a colorful past. Poignant, well-told recollections keep the reader engaged. MacDonald’s writing, like the management style he chronicles, is deliberate and nuanced, not flashy. Understatement and pacing magnify inherent tensions, as in a passage describing three executives awaiting a bank decision on renewing a $650 million loan: “The loan would mature the next day. I asked Jonathan at exactly what time; after checking the documents, he told me 11 a.m. No one had ever asked him before at precisely what time of day a loan matured.” MacDonald draws his characters concisely. A chief financial officer is “a quiet guy, the type who knew all the answers but was reticent to disclose any.” An Australian banker speaks in “an earthy vernacular, reflecting his early days as a union organizer and Labor Party activist.” In closing, he summarizes 25 key lessons, emphasizing teamwork, ethics, win-win solutions, decentralized decision-making, open communications, and respecting workers. None are entirely original, but his life experiences elevate platitudes to practical guidance. MacDonald puts a compassionate face on the CEO stereotype and reveals real people, not caricatures, caught in the executive-suite dramas spawned by the financial crisis.
For business readers, this insider’s tale informs and entertains.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68102-080-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Next Century Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
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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