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
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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