A well-researched, accessibly written M&A handbook.
Harris and Sherrill, a pair of mergers-and-acquisitions experts, provide advice to business owners looking to sell.
The book opens with a fictional vignette that reflects a common mistake that some people make when selling their companies: The seller, Alma, started the process excited that “the sale was going to set her up for the next adventure” and “provide her with the kind of financial security she had always dreamed about.” But she sold her company for less than what she had anticipated, underprepared for and exhausted by the lengthy, complex process, and she felt defeated rather than elated when it was complete. Harris (an M&A sell-side adviser) and Sherrill (an entrepreneur) assert that far too many owners unnecessarily jeopardize their legacy and leave millions on the table due to ill-advised exit strategies. In this volume, they offer detailed, scenario-based tips to would-be sellers on how to best equip themselves for an eventual sale. Their advice touches on two overarching themes. The first is that preparation starts early and not only involves creating an attractive, well-structured business, but also entails getting into the minutiae of tax forecasting, legal planning, wealth preservation, and estate structuring, among other elements. The second major guiding principle is that owners should consult coaches and other experts; the failure to do so, Harris and Sherrill note, is the most common mistake owners make, as it goes against ingrained entrepreneurial impulses (“Why pay someone to tell me what I can figure out myself?”). As the authors convincingly argue, a thoughtfully prepared merger and acquisition process is not something that most entrepreneurs are equipped to handle alone. Harris and Sherrill have a combined five decades of experience and involvement on both sides of the selling process, serving as both business owners and coaches. Overall, they offer business owners a thoughtful guidebook to the complexities of the business-sale process.
A well-researched, accessibly written M&A handbook.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781967509065
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Cheval Press
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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