Inspiring stories from unexpected places showing that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and kicking.
An iconic entrepreneur shows how a new generation of American business leaders is taking shape in the vibrant cities of the heartland.
Case, author of The Third Wave, co-founded America Online and the investment firm Revolution LLC. In 2017, he set up an initiative called Rise of the Rest with the aim of revitalizing fading cities by developing an innovative startup culture. Because 75% of the country’s venture capital goes to California, New York, and Massachusetts, entrepreneurs elsewhere often find it difficult to obtain seed funds. Case’s initiative was armed with a bucket of funds contributed by investors such as Jeff Bezos and Ray Dalio, and the climax of each stop on their nationwide bus tour was a pitch competition with a $100,000 investment prize. In addition to the cash prize, Case’s group provided important advice and contacts. From the beginning, Case wanted to focus on Black and women entrepreneurs, who often find the startup road particularly challenging. The author delivers an abundance of stories about companies with significant potential and vision, but their chances of success increase dramatically if they have a supporting ecosystem of talented people and infrastructure. City and state governments can help to provide this structure, and where they have, there is often a sense of renewal. The pandemic was a setback, but there was a silver lining: Many ambitious people left their jobs in San Francisco, New York, or Boston to return to their home cities, leading to revivals in places like Omaha, Chattanooga, and Green Bay. The shift toward remote work was also a positive for many emerging businesses. In fact, it seems that the pandemic provided a boost to the startup community nationwide, with 5.4 million new business applications filed in 2021. Case also emphasizes the importance of follow-through on the Rise initiative, and he established a system for ongoing contact and monitoring.
Inspiring stories from unexpected places showing that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and kicking.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982191-84-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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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