Incisive reading for both women and men about the dynamics of corporate leadership.
A leadership consultant examines business executive Andrea Jung’s tenure as Avon CEO and the lessons her rise to and fall from power offer those seeking to climb the corporate ladder.
Jung had no real desire to become CEO when she joined the venerable but staid Avon cosmetics corporation as a marketing consultant in 1993. But her exotic beauty, intelligence and charisma captivated everyone. So did her innovative, risk-taking style, which almost immediately began yielding profits for Avon. With the help of then-CEO Jim Preston, Jung became head of global marketing for Avon in 1996 and, not long afterward, company president and COO. Three years later, she was named CEO at a time when the company shares had plummeted and corporate takeover rumors abounded. Jung met the challenge by implementing ambitious plans to develop “higher quality…products than local markets could produce [while] also working with local managers [to help] them meet the needs of their customers.” Her visionary but often expensive initiatives fueled unparalleled growth and expansion. When Avon’s fortunes took a downward turn in 2005, she took the unprecedented step of firing herself and rehiring a leaner, meaner Jung. But as former Avon exec Himsel (Leadership Sopranos Style, 2003) notes, the same people-pleasing trait that had helped Jung at the outset of her career at Avon ultimately made her unable to impact corporate culture enough to make it as “accountable and performance-driven as it should have been.” Continued financial losses and scandals—including a Securities and Exchange Commission probe into financial improprieties in the Chinese market—led to her resignation in 2011. With insight and sensitivity, Himsel transforms Jung’s amazing story into a clearsighted study of how personal/professional characteristics, gender and corporate culture can impact the ultimate success or failure of even the most talented CEOs.
Incisive reading for both women and men about the dynamics of corporate leadership.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-137-27882-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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