A mixed bag but of interest to readers looking to jump-start their creative powers and raise quick-witted children.
A blend of old and new—and sometimes original—informs this pop-science piece on creativity and its discontents.
Grant (Wharton Business School; Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, 2013) has a flair for the novel and the outwardly puzzling, though the writing is merely capable and the book likely to have “negligible impact” against leviathans such as Daniel Kahneman and Malcolm Gladwell. Unkind words, but Grant sets them up, observing that negative book reviews sound 14 percent smarter than positive ones, so we’re being self-serving in our negativity. Self-service is to the point, since, by Grant’s account, institutions that are friendly to innovation are also generous of spirit, creating “strong cultures of commitment” and building an atmosphere of love and collegiality, even familiarity. Along the way to discussing how creativity flourishes—and it does indeed hinge on nonconformity, as the subtitle promises, which is by way of saying that it requires risk—Grant lands on such things as how parents encourage children just the right amount: a parent who successfully encourages a child to be independent, an explorer of the world, has to step back and allow that child to find greater models than himself or herself. As Grant puts it, provocatively, “Parents aren’t the best role models.” Interestingly, the author turns back to the old birth-order hypothesis, in which firstborns and later-borns have different approaches to risk and thus different creative abilities; he finds it to have validity, “a better predictor of personality and behavior than I had expected.” Grant sometimes gets tangled in jargon, but he turns up some fascinating tidbits, including the observation that “our intuitions are only accurate in domains where we have a lot of experience”—an insight worth the cover price alone.
A mixed bag but of interest to readers looking to jump-start their creative powers and raise quick-witted children.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-42956-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
An English journalist's judicious, albeit limited, take on the shape of things to come over the next generation. In evaluating what the future might hold, McRae, an associate editor of the British periodical Independent, all but ignores large areas of the Global Village, most notably the Middle East, to focus on North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. Before venturing any predictions, however, the author offers savvy status reports on the three economically consequential and committedly capitalist regions he has singled out for attention. McRae then assesses the forces that promise to change the developed world in the next 30 years or so. Cases in point range from demography (which tops his short list) through financial services, governance, natural resources, sociopolitical organization, technology, and trade. The accessible text (published last year in the UK) has helpful graphics and tabular material throughout. Getting down to business, the author provides plausibly detailed briefings on his trio of industrialized locales two decades into the next millennium. In McRae's informed opinion, for example, a vibrant US will have moved further down the road toward becoming a truly multicultural society, one whose living standards may depend on its capacity to reduce the costs of broken homes, crime, a decline in personal responsibility, and excessive litigiousness. By contrast, he suggest that the EU's economic ties could have come undone as a result of cultural diversity and issues of sovereignty. In the meantime, he concludes, an aging Japan could be hard put to keep pace with populous mainland China, whose economic potential is just now being realized. Whether or not McRae has 20/20 foresight, his short-run scenarios for free enterprise's showcase venues are both thought- provoking and credible. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: March 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-87584-604-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
Jungian analyst Hillman (coauthor, Freud's Own Cookbook, 1985, etc.) rambles on about a new, and hopefully healthier, paradigm of power for the business world. Hillman believes that business offers the closest thing our civilization has to a universal theology, and with that in mind he tries to destroy some old idols in the temple. In the first part of this book, he views two traditional notions of business health- -growth and efficiency—as limiting and even dangerous (Treblinka, he notes, resulted from the Nazis' push to kill with maximum efficiency). In contrast, he argues, the next century will need to stress service and maintenance, which place a premium on the personal dimension of life often devalued in the drive for growth and efficiency. Hillman then examines 20 different kinds of power, including prestige, exhibitionism, tyranny, concentration, authority, fearsomeness, purism, charisma, and subtle power. In the last section, he explores the power of myths on ideas, positing the existence of, and then characterizing, an armful of worldviews: the ``cyclical return'' of history; ``gloom and doom''; ``hopeful greening''; and ``apocalyptic catastrophe.'' Instead of dehumanizing control, he aims for ``maximizing through discretion, rather than direction.'' Well and good. The problem comes with his method of analysis, which is long on examining the etymology of words and the classical myths that illustrate forms of power, but is short on applying any of this to contemporary business. His tactic is ``to keep the ideas brief, quick, heated and scattered.'' The result is often psychobabble (``The intelligent exercise of power begins in the mind that has insight into the deeper structures of actions''). In his gnomic one-liners, Hillman comes across as part latter- day Emerson and part Sensitive New Age Guy, but the reader is likely to view the whole as flapdoodle.
Pub Date: April 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-46964-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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