A sweeping but down-to-earth manifesto on the promise and perils of trying new things.
Corporations desperately need to come up with innovations but are going about it in the wrong ways, according to this penetrating business study.
Parker, the CEO of the venture capital firm High Alpha Innovation, decries the “innovation theater” that he sees at many companies in which dedicated teams act busy without generating useful, transformative ideas. In this book, he presents a far-reaching critique of corporate culture, specifically its aversion to upheaval. He argues that companies aim to conduct business with maximum efficiency while avoiding risk; they employ hierarchical “vetocracies” that enable managers to thwart any threat to the status quo. By contrast, Parker says, disruptive innovation requires a firm to pursue uncertain goals and spend money on projects that may not pan out and can’t be justified by short-term metrics. Innovation’s benefits, he asserts, lie in learning of new skills and creating options a company can pursue when radical changes in the economy occur. The rise of artificial intelligence is one such cataclysm, he contends, which will force firms to either innovate or die. The solution to the conundrum, this book says, is for companies to empower mavericks and small teams to innovate without stifling bureaucratic constraints, to embrace the messiness of the process, and to conduct many low-cost investment experiments to find the few that will stick. Because such a path is hard for hidebound businesses to follow, Parker recommends a strategy of seeking out partnerships with nimble startup entrepreneurs, for whom innovation is second nature—the kind his own firm nurtures.
Parker’s primer draws on his own experiences in innovation—starting with a college mold-remediation business, which he promptly ditched—along with colorful historical case studies, including the National Basketball Association’s adoption of a three-point line and the demolition of the Valeo auto-parts company’s supply chain by the Covid-19 pandemic. He grounds his insights in a wealth of far-flung ideas, from economist Ronald Coase’s theory of the corporation as a machine for lowering transaction costs to seeing the Amazonian jungle as a metaphor for the riot of innovation that firms should incubate. Parker’s attack on corporate stodginess is biting and sardonic: “Our team felt like animals in a petting zoo, brought out for show but with limited ability to really do what we knew we could do best,” as he recalls of one innovation-management gig. But he also writes exuberantly about the potential of innovation, exulting that “we are currently living right at that unique moment in the history of the universe when things go crazy and exponential.” His writing strikes a nice balance between pithy aphorism (“Pessimists sound smart. But optimists make money, and they shape the future”) and concrete discussions of practicalities (“Here’s a quick heuristic: If you can build a forecast of first-year financial results for a new business concept with a high degree of confidence, you should likely launch the idea inside of a corporation”). The result is a clear-eyed take on the necessity for change in business, and the careful journey it demands.
A sweeping but down-to-earth manifesto on the promise and perils of trying new things.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781646871544
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 13, 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
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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