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WILD RIDE

INSIDE UBER'S QUEST FOR WORLD DOMINATION

A straightforward journalistic examination of a fast-tracked, controversial company and its headstrong leader.

The rise and plateau of the global ride-sharing industry’s biggest player.

Uber Technologies CEO Travis Kalanick remains the emboldened maverick leader of the company, and Fortune executive editor Lashinsky (Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works, 2012) paints him as a persistent, “pugnacious” leader unafraid of “clashing with adversaries.” The author sketches his subject’s life, from a middle-class Southern California upbringing to UCLA dropout to his struggles with two collapsed startup businesses, Scour and the moderately successful Red Swoosh. The idea for Uber was first hatched in 2008 through a collaboration between Kalanick and friend Garrett Camp, with both men envisioning “a way to turn one’s phone into a taxi dispatcher.” From the company’s first controversy, when San Francisco regulatory agents issued a cease-and-desist letter—the former “UberCab” amended its name to Uber and dismissed the city’s demands—to its current operating capacity in more than 570 cities worldwide, Lashinsky proficiently lays out the details of the privately held company with a checkered past haunting its precarious future. Thankfully, the author isn’t shy about exposing Uber’s “dirty-pool behavior” and cites sordid tales of harassed customers and abused drivers, cities suing over Uber’s legality, their heavily derided “surge pricing” tactic, Kalanick’s misogynistic, “alpha-male” reputation, and the company’s arrogant, above-the-law public perception. Equally revealing is a section about the deceptively easy process whereby Lashinsky himself became an Uber driver (“no test, no interview, no nothing”) only to swiftly discover that “the pay stinks, and the work is difficult.” The author also chronicles his interviews with current and former drivers who offer no-nonsense opinions on the advantages and disappointments of their experience with Uber as well as updates on the self-driving car innovation and the company’s defeat in the Chinese marketplace by rival Didi.

A straightforward journalistic examination of a fast-tracked, controversial company and its headstrong leader.

Pub Date: May 23, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-7352-1139-1

Page Count: 242

Publisher: Portfolio

Review Posted Online: May 15, 2017

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THE CULTURE MAP

BREAKING THROUGH THE INVISIBLE BOUNDARIES OF GLOBAL BUSINESS

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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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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