A well-organized fount of executive prudence.
A retired business executive draws practical lessons from a long corporate career.
Books on business leadership are hardly in short supply, but the biographical ones tend to highlight the careers of those few who climbed to the top of their industries, leaving a whole range of executive experience unrepresented. Furthermore, debut author Kahn observes, professional fulfillment is available to those who don’t ultimately rise to C-suite status, though business schools do little to prepare their students to thoughtfully govern their own personal searches for job satisfaction. To that end, the author presents an autobiographical account of his career in the form of a series of case studies—each one presents an occupational challenge, Kahn’s response to it, and a brief summary of the lessons he learned. The author went to Purdue University on a Naval ROTC scholarship, graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1957. After leaving the Marines in 1960, he graduated from Harvard Business School in 1963 and secured a job at Procter & Gamble working on iconic brands like Joy and Tide. He would have other employers, but this institutional triad—the Marines, Harvard, and Procter & Gamble—furnished the fulcrum of lessons that strike him as the most impactful as well as the ones of which he’s proudest. Written in informally lucid prose, Kahn’s reflections break up into two categories: the more narrowly professional ones account for a wide range of significant decisions. For example, he helpfully supplies counsel regarding how to choose an employer and when to resign from one. The second category of advice sensibly covers the intersection of the professional and the personal—the author discusses the nature of career fulfillment, family life, and the importance of leaving a legacy of which one can be proud. Much of the advice is so common-sensical it seems hardly worth mentioning: “The basic thing I learned was to think and to use my head.” But some of it is much more thought-provoking, including Kahn’s views on the balance between work and family, and is likely to be especially useful to young executives early in their careers.
A well-organized fount of executive prudence.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5471-0253-2
Page Count: 142
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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