Serious restaurateurs will appreciate this comprehensive guide to delivery success.
A data-driven look at the steps restaurants must take to thrive in the digital age.
Debut authors Sandland and Orsbourn draw upon their extensive backgrounds in restaurant development and operations to craft a manual that aims to allow restaurants to meet their customers “where they are: online.” The authors begin their analysis with a demographic and sociological explanation for why their work is necessary. As Americans have shifted away from traditional family structures, for example, they’ve relied more heavily on restaurants for both sustenance and pleasure. Millennials and members of Generation Z, the authors say, spend significant amounts of their monthly income on restaurant meals, and they want to eat what they want, whenever they want it, so they order online; for these digital natives, “delivery is the new drive thru. And the rest of the population is not far behind.” The authors effectively explain the core competencies of digital platforms and analyze compelling examples of successful food delivery systems from around the world. They highlight marketing and customization opportunities for such systems without ignoring their challenges, such as the fact that off-premise consumers typically don’t order beverages and desserts. The authors also discuss the potential inherent in “ghost kitchens”—kitchens shared by multiple restaurants that focus on delivery only—and constantly stress the role that the Covid-19 pandemic is playing in the evolution of the food-service industry. Perhaps most notably for independent restaurant owners, Sandland and Orsbourn clearly lay out how marketing opportunities expand when a consumer uses a restaurant’s own online system rather than a third-party platform, such as DoorDash. The book also features insights drawn from more than 100 interviews with industry insiders and data from a variety of sources in multiple charts and graphs. Overall, Sandland and Orsbourn have created an essential road map for operating restaurants successfully in the modern age.
Serious restaurateurs will appreciate this comprehensive guide to delivery success.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64543-948-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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