A sweeping tale of ambition, arrogance, egos, and feuds—and how they brought down a once-great company.
A business journalist traces the rise and fall of General Electric, the company that once exemplified American business.
There was a time when GE, a key player in the electricity revolution that powered America in the 20th century, was a leader in innovation and acumen, a reputation that persisted into the postwar era as it became a diversified conglomerate. Now there are only scattered fragments and a broken reputation. In this hefty study, Cohan, a former investment banker who has written multiple books on finance and Wall Street, delves into the records of the company’s early days, but he also presents the results of his interviews with CEOs of the modern era: Jack Welch, Jeff Immelt, and John Flannery. The current CEO, Larry Culp, declined to participate. Welch’s drive took the company into new areas, but his tenure was also problematic. GE’s strength was always industrial operations, but Welch moved it into media and financial services, using its internal bank GE Capital as the springboard. Welch picked Immelt as his successor but later said that the choice was a mistake. Immelt, for his part, claims that he spent much of his tenure cleaning up disasters that Welch swept under the rug (all of which he covers in detail in his 2021 memoir, Hot Seat). By the time Welch stepped down in 2001, the company had become dangerously overextended. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the corporation’s myriad weaknesses, and a painful period of sell-offs began. Flannery tried to bring order to the chaos with a proposal for radical restructuring, but he was fired after only 15 months. This is a long, complicated story, and there are times when Cohan struggles to keep the sprawling cast of squabbling characters organized. As he capably shows, all of GE’s leaders made mistakes, but there was also a pervasive sense of hubris. Would-be corporate titans, take note.
A sweeping tale of ambition, arrogance, egos, and feuds—and how they brought down a once-great company.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-08416-8
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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