Sadly, there’s no moral to be learned in Rivlin’s weak tale, a classic example of a magazine article fattened up to make a...
A thin profile—in every sense—of one of the few high-tech movers and shakers who has so far failed to become a household name.
Now in his early 50s, Ron Conway was raised in Silicon Valley, where he got to know some of the geeks and wonks who would put personal computers in every home. Though not particularly technically adept himself, Conway quickly proved himself to be a gifted salesman, “never a crude backslapper,” as journalist Rivlin (A Fire on the Prairie, 1992) puts it, “but instead the type who killed you through attention.” That talent served Conway well as he talked his way onto the boards and into the stock-option plans of one startup after another, amassing a sizable fortune while carefully spending other people’s money. His influence grew with his founding a venture-capital fund called Angel Investors, which capped at $150 million in 1999 and had holdings in dozens of tech firms large and small—which, in turn, had holdings in the fund, the high-tech world evidently having little interest in the question of conflict of interest. Conway rode (and sometimes drove) the dot.com boom for all it was worth, netting his investors massive returns and garnering a reputation for turning one dollar into ten nearly overnight. When reality caught up and the tech bull market got swallowed by a giant bear, Conway’s fund declined with all the rest; at the end, Rivlin quotes the once-optimistic Conway: “At this point, I'd be happy if I was able to get people their money back.” Conway has something of Gatsby about him, but Rivlin doesn’t tell us much about what makes him tick, and he fails to provide any of the parallel-universe detail that makes Po Bronson’s The Nudist on the Late Shift, Michael Lewis’s The New New Thing, and Douglas Coupland’s thinly fictionalized Microserfs such absorbing reading on the matter of Silicon Valley.
Sadly, there’s no moral to be learned in Rivlin’s weak tale, a classic example of a magazine article fattened up to make a book—and, in this case, an e-book as well.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2001
ISBN: 0-8129-9163-X
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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