Solid and actionable business advice hampered at times by a rough tone.
Cleland, the CEO and founder of the Soltara Healing Center, offers strategies for entrepreneurial combat in this guide.
The author is the head of a Costa Rica–based health-retreat company that depended upon international travel, which was dramatically affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. He realized that he was fighting for his financial life, so he decided to document his experience in these pages. The result is a book that interweaves an account of this journey with 12 “laws” he developed to make it through the upheaval. Comparing entrepreneurship to jungle combat may not be a novel concept, but it serves the author well; as he asserts, “our dreams reserve themselves for those who are daring enough to troop into the jungle, endure the ruthless elements, and keep taking enormous action.” Cleland’s laws are also creatively couched in this metaphor; Law 3, for instance, is “Learn to Hunt” (referring to “selling and influencing”); Law 7 is “Plan for Snakebites,” or, rather, setbacks; and Law 9 is “Sharpen Your Spear,” which encourages readers to look for major opportunities. Early on, Cleland refers to “the Wartime CEO,” suggesting that “decisions are the individual moves that advance your startup war.” By setting this kind of tone, Cleland’s makes it clear that his own business survival was at stake, and he makes a convincing case for doing whatever it takes to succeed. However, the result is a take-no-prisoners atmosphere that may not appeal to all readers. Still, the book’s messaging is on target and will be relevant to budding entrepreneurs as well as those who’ve long been in business. It includes such fundamentals as how to develop a sound vision, motivate a team, and master one’s financial resources, and these basic building blocks are described well. In addition, the fact that Cleland is providing this real-time counsel as he undergoes his own business struggles has real resonance, as when he advises entrepreneurs to “realize deeply that your decisions aren’t just about now” and to “have backup plans. And backup plans to those backup plans.”
Solid and actionable business advice hampered at times by a rough tone.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2732-1
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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