A carefully assembled, thorough book that should be required reading for corporate leaders.
Former Secretary of State Rice (Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom, 2017, etc.) and Zegart (Eyes on Spies: Congress and the United States Intelligence Community, 2011, etc.), both Stanford political scientists, describe how political risk can affect businesses—and what to do about it.
SeaWorld is devastated by online social activism over its mistreatment of killer whales. Sony Entertainment loses trade secrets to hackers. Kazakhstan becomes independent, and Chevron faces a nightmare over an oil-and-gas concession in the dissolving Soviet Republic. Such are the new dangers—from geopolitics to cyberthreats and terrorism—facing corporations in the turbulent global landscape of “unprecedented” economic opportunities and political risks of the past 30 years. During this period, societal changes—e.g., supply chain innovations, the communications revolution, and post–Cold War politics—have given rise to potentially harmful actions by individuals with cellphones, local officials using city ordinances, terrorists using truck bombs, and the U.N. imposing sanctions. Now, write the authors, “anyone armed with a cell phone or a Twitter or Facebook account can create political risks.” Based on a Stanford seminar taught by the authors, the book examines the “notoriously difficult” job of managing the countless political risks that businesses face. Some firms excel, notably FedEx, Marriott, Disney, and the Lego Group as well as many cruise lines, chemical companies, law firms, tech companies, and others. Some have even created “mini-CIAs.” Drawing on research, interviews, and their own experiences, Rice and Zegart provide detailed examples of companies that have succeeded or failed in meeting the new challenges and outline key ways to approach risks: Get good information. Build trusting relationships. Analyze continually. Integrate political risk analysis into business decision-making. As the authors write in closing, “the most effective organizations have three big things in common: They take political risk seriously, they approach it systematically, and they lead from the top.”
A carefully assembled, thorough book that should be required reading for corporate leaders.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4235-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.
Essayist, novelist and pop-culture guru Gay (An Untamed State, 2014, etc.) sounds off on the frustrating complexities of gender and race in pop culture and society as a whole.
In this diverse collection of short essays, the author launches her critical salvos at seemingly countless waves of pop-cultural cannon fodder. Although the title can be somewhat misleading—she’s more of an inconsistent or conflicted feminist—the author does her best to make up for any feminist flaws by addressing, for instance, the disturbing language bandied about carelessly in what she calls “rape culture” in society—and by Gay’s measure, this is a culture in which even the stately New York Times is complicit. However, she makes weak attempts at coming to terms with her ambivalence toward the sort of violent female empowerment depicted in such movies as The Hunger Games. Gay explores the reasons for her uneasiness with the term “women’s fiction” and delivers some not-very-convincing attempts to sort out what drives her to both respect and loathe a femalecentric TV show like Lena Dunham’s Girls. Although generally well-written, some of these gender-studies essays come off as preachy and dull as a public service announcement—especially the piece about her endless self-questioning of her love-hate relationship with the tacky female-submission fantasies in Fifty Shades of Grey. Yet when it comes to race-related matters (in the section "Race and Entertainment"), Gay’s writing is much more impassioned and persuasive. Whether critiquing problematic pandering tropes in Tyler Perry’s movies or the heavy-handed and often irresponsible way race is dealt with in movies like The Help, 12 Years a Slave or Django Unchained, Gay relentlessly picks apart mainstream depictions of the black experience on-screen and rightfully laments that “all too often critical acclaim for black films is built upon the altar of black suffering or subjugation.”
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228271-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The benefit of slavery is but one of the firebombs lobbed within a book that more are likely to find infuriating than...
A conservative professor of economics and public policy argues that conventional attitudes about racism and social injustice are not only wrong, but harmful as well, in an analysis that will spark outrage among the liberal intellectuals that he targets.
Sowell (The Housing Boom and Bust, 2009, etc.) understates the case when he writes that he has arrived at “many conclusions very different from those currently prevailing in the media, in politics or in academia.” The result of that common liberal consensus, he charges, “has been a steady drumbeat of grievance and victimhood ideologies, from the media, from educational institutions and from other institutions permeated by the vision of the intelligentsia.” As a member of the media, an educator, an intellectual and a black man (who often writes about racial issues from a conservative perspective), Sowell relishes his role as provocateur. Of course, the author’s version of truth serves an agenda suggesting that the black community might have been better off before initiatives such as civil rights and affirmative action and that blaming society for the inequities suffered by minorities represents “a long tradition of intellectuals who more or less automatically transform differences into inequities and inequities into the evils or shortcomings of society.” Even if blacks have less opportunity than whites, achieve less and commit more crime, he writes, these are not the results of oppression, and they can’t be resolved by “a lifestyle of dependency.” Instead, “those who lag, for whatever reasons, face a daunting task of bringing themselves up to the rest of society in knowledge, skills and experience—and in the attitudes necessary to acquire this knowledge and these skills and experience.” In other words, the problem isn’t white racism but black attitudes.
The benefit of slavery is but one of the firebombs lobbed within a book that more are likely to find infuriating than enlightening.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-465-05872-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
