A clearly worded handbook for covering the business basics.
A debut guide offers a systematic plan for entrepreneurs to improve their companies.
“No company ever becomes best in class by accident,” Yong repeats throughout his book, reiterating it especially when he’s underscoring the long odds against any new business venture succeeding. He sees the prevalent perception in the entrepreneurial world as running at sharp odds to the actual reality. “If you ask business owners whether or not they consider themselves leaders,” he writes, “there is a good chance that almost all of them will answer in the affirmative,” when in truth most of them are followers, consciously or unconsciously aping the success strategies of others rather than tailor-fitting strategies of their own. This volume, written in many short, easily digestible segments, is meant as a corrective to this kind of lemming mentality. It’s a step-by-step breakdown of basic business-world principles that most experienced hands will likely find elementary but which, Yong maintains, are overlooked far more frequently than they should be. These principles revolve around four “pillars”: the entrepreneur, ideas or innovations, employees, and customers. On the personal level, Yong argues that effective leadership remains a powerful antidote to the “disharmony” of faulty expectations. He stresses the power of corporate culture and innovation as well (“Remember that structure is a form of strategy”), but the strongest points of his book involve the externals: building and inspiring a band of workers and creating a loyal customer base. Entrepreneurs at all levels of experience are urged to liken the assembling of a core group of employees to recruiting for a championship sports team, and readers are reminded of something far too many businesses forget: customers are the one indispensable key to any company’s success. Yong’s prose can sometimes be stultifyingly droning (“To maximize your customer relationships, it is important to identify them and get to know who they are and why they are buying from you,” etc.), but what he lacks in subtlety, he makes up for in forcefulness.
A clearly worded handbook for covering the business basics.Pub Date: May 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-71887-2
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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