The author employs jargon, to be sure, but he explains each piece of jargon with admirable clarity.
A business consultant argues for the importance of learning through human interactions rather than always emphasizing computer-generated data.
Producing a mixture of how-to text and trenchant philosophy, Madsbjerg illustrates his formula for problem-solving with rich, captivating anecdotes, many of them mini case studies. The author clearly explains his bafflement at the devaluation of individual human judgment based on close observation followed by analytical thought. Madsbjerg is no Luddite—he fully understands the value of data generated by algorithms—but he feels certain that one finely tuned human mind can solve problems that are beyond the grasp of emotionless computers. The author’s concept of “sensemaking” includes five steps: understanding the culture in which businesses are trying to sell their products and services; relying on data that is collected via human observation rather than just preprogrammed algorithms; viewing individual behavior in a natural rather than a compromised setting (“the savannah—not the zoo”); trusting the kind of creative insights that qualify as sudden revelations; and using tools from the natural world, supplemented by computer data, rather than vice versa. Certainly, some elements of sensemaking could also be termed by the less-innovative term “common sense.” Madsbjerg relates how faculty at the U.S. Naval Academy stopped teaching celestial navigation in the late 1990s after deciding to rely on satellite technology and GPS. In the past year, though, the academy has reinstituted the teaching of navigating by the stars. Why not use all available tools, combining them to guide a ship’s course? After offering dozens of interesting examples from the material world of corporations, Madsbjerg relates an especially memorable sensemaking study of how hostage negotiator Chris Voss relied on his humanities training to broker the release of journalist Jill Carroll from Iraq.
The author employs jargon, to be sure, but he explains each piece of jargon with admirable clarity.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-39324-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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