A concise and compelling rethinking of an unjustly deemphasized element of corporate strategy.
A business book offers a panoramic reconsideration of capital expenditure strategy, its place in a company’s overall vision, and its significance in the global economy.
According to Weissenrieder and Lindén, capital expenditure is both absolutely crucial to a company’s success and largely deprioritized. For the most part, firms continue to rely on methodological approaches that date back to the 1960s and fail to take advantage of the considerable progress in computer technology—especially regarding calculative measurement—but even more disastrously assume the perch of “analytic thinking” versus “systems thinking.” In other words, each capex project is adopted in a spirit of reactive assessment, with companies seeing a series of isolated opportunities rather than a “holistic” strategy that examines the whole financial picture. In fact, most capex projects do not add any value, and site managers generally pursue them in order to maintain current operations, not maximize shareholder value. As a result of this piecemeal approach, only a “fraction of the capex budget goes to the sites that are the real economic engines of the company—the powerhouses that keep pouring money into the company’s coffers.” The authors eloquently argue that a company’s prospects for success hinge on the creation of an overarching capex vision that includes a 10-to-15-year horizon of predictions: “Why do some succeed where others end up in disaster? It is not that some companies are luckier with pricing or were dealt a better economic hand. It comes from superior capital allocation decisions; it’s how leadership reacts to those conditions. Poor companies result from poor capital allocation and end up with poor competitiveness and cash flow. Companies allocate resources to assets not creating value and starve those that are.” The authors not only limn a comprehensive synopsis of their radical reinterpretation of capex strategy, but also provide painstakingly granular illustrations—they forward a theory, but a thoroughly empirical one well evidenced by their own considerable experience and a wealth of data.
Weissenrieder and Lindén have a great expanse of experience in capex strategy between the two of them, and their expertise is inarguable—they write with immense confidence and intellectual circumspection. Unlike the typical business book today, which promises the world and largely delivers conventional platitudes, this one is equal to its promises, tackling the issue with all the rigor of an academic treatise. But the volume is not a mélange of intellectual abstractions—the authors make an argument and then provide substantiation for their thesis. And while that argument often is necessarily a technically formidable one—this is not a breezy book—they advance their position with much more lucidity than could be reasonably expected. Moreover, they also consider the macro-level impact of reforming capex strategy, which they believe is an essential part of the “virtuous cycle” of creative destruction as well as a healthy global economy that is financially and environmentally sustainable: “Creative destruction is a fundamental fact of free markets and capitalism, and the fundamental drivers of creative destruction are innovation and capital allocation. The smoother the wheels of the creative destruction process can turn, the higher the economic growth.” This is a masterly and analytically scrupulous work, and it should serve as a model for other books in the genre.
A concise and compelling rethinking of an unjustly deemphasized element of corporate strategy.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-264-28529-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
