An inspiring but somewhat familiar tale of success driven by salesmanship.
A memoir about the life and leadership methods McDermott, the recently appointed CEO of software giant SAP, employed to shape the trajectory of his career.
The author attributes his rise—from salesman to corporate management and executive leadership at the Xerox Corporation, on to higher executive positions at tech companies Siebel and SAP—to his family and his experience as a teenage entrepreneurial delicatessen owner on Long Island. When he added pinball machines at his deli, which helped increase sales and pay off the financing for his purchase within a year, he learned a lesson he never forgot: the importance of stretching to achieve seemingly impossible goals. The author learned the importance of teamwork from his basketball coach father, and selling his mother's sandwiches taught him about providing customers what they wanted (“he would later call this “customer-centricity”). His successful business model involved combining the work of sales forces, product developers and administrators to improve sales results by developing conceptual packages that empowered clients to increase their own productivity. When McDermott demanded that salespeople become “innovators,” he combined almost unreachable stretch goals with equally grandiose reward programs—e.g., family vacations in Hawaii—and teamwork-enhancing education and discussion processes. He became the go-to businessman for a company requiring a major revenue boost to reverse declining sales. As he took on other projects, he set specific goals at well-staged conferences, and he organized follow-up through continuing education. In just one year, he led the Puerto Rican sales district from the bottom to the top of Xerox's hierarchy. At SAP, sales were doubled in a year, helping to turn around the deleterious effects of the 2008 economic slump. Much later, McDermott graduated from business school and the Wharton executive development program.
An inspiring but somewhat familiar tale of success driven by salesmanship.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476761084
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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