Vivid, encouraging guidance for problem solvers of all kinds.
Innovation professionals McClure and Wilde provide a blueprint to help readers navigate and thrive in complicated times.
In their debut nonfiction collaboration, the authors confront the seemingly insuperable chaos of the modern world, full of entrenched crises with no clear solutions. “Hard problems aren’t hard simply because they are big,” they point out, referring to everything from climate change to school and community issues. “Problems are hard because they have many parts that are tangled up with one another.” In response to these problems, McClure and Wilde propose the concept of “ecosystem innovation,” a practice that “builds an ecosystem of different actors and resources that all work together to achieve a goal.” They detail (with accompanying diagrams and bulleted points) the business models of entities including Airbnb, the Angry Birds app, and organizations like Solar Sister, a company that seeks to provide affordable power to the 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who have no electricity. At every step, the authors analyze the strategies used in their examples, such as the “agile pilot” methodology (“Generate many ideas. Make the first trial of an idea as small as possible and test it as quickly as possible—creating a minimum viable product [MVP] to see if an idea works”), which works well for smaller problems (“This is an innovation model that can be done on a small enough scale that you can hide it in a closet”). Wilde and McClure are very clear-eyed guides through all the concepts they explore, and their prose manages to be both information-dense and extremely readable. The sentiment running through their discussions is an inclusive optimism: “Innovation can’t be a mysterious thing that only a handful of special people in exceptional circumstances can do,” they write in a typically energized passage. “You need to be able to step up to a problem worthy of your effort and deliver results with lasting impact.”
Vivid, encouraging guidance for problem solvers of all kinds.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781639080694
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Fast Company Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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