While some business executives may find the author’s assessment sobering if not downright depressing, this book provides the...
A welcome update on building a sales force in the new economic environment.
The financial meltdown of 2008 claimed many victims, but an area that surely felt intense pressure was the corporate sales force. Every company’s sales force had to adjust to a new market reality. The author of this timely book, an international business consultant who highlights some of her firm’s research into sales organizations, writes that a “new customer profile” started to take shape after the financial crisis. Customers “were less trusting and found heavy selling tactics repulsive...they wanted price and if that was right, then they would look at other key factors.” Crane says, “Effective salespeople now are those that are able to confront and challenge their customers’ thinking and influence them in such a way that changes their minds.” This new requirement, the author says, demands a new kind of salesperson: “It is about a sales force that is enabled with a broader degree of knowledge and skill that can take a strong case to customers and influence them to change their minds about how they do business.” Crane offers important advice to companies, including how to refocus, why a new kind of sales manager is necessary, the importance of systems, keys to developing the right relationship between sales and marketing, and perhaps most importantly, ways to transform not just the sales force but the manner in which the company does business. Rather than serve up a sugarcoated, lightweight primer, Crane delves deeply into the messy, complex world of corporate selling. She strongly lobbies for “embracing transformation from within,” even though she makes clear that there are no easy answers. Of course, making a case for taking action is one thing; executing a plan of action is quite another, so it’s helpful that Crane includes three pertinent case studies at the end of the book to show in detail how business’ transformations can impact sales in today’s market. “Don’t be yesterday’s company in tomorrow’s world,” she urges.
While some business executives may find the author’s assessment sobering if not downright depressing, this book provides the wake-up call many may need to stoke up their sales forces.Pub Date: March 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-1449960353
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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