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
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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