Nicely orchestrated and well-executed business advice.
A bassist-cum–business consultant employs a music analogy to explain project portfolio management.
In presenting a complex business topic, some analogies can be exceedingly effective while others can wear thin. Leonard’s debut compares the culture of an organization to the bass in an orchestra. More broadly, he views an orchestra and its musicians akin to a business organization and its employees. Because of the author’s in-depth knowledge of both music and project management, the analogy is sustainable: “If an orchestra cannot play a versatile range of music, after a while, their performance will become predictable and stale….There has to be a framework in place that allows new pieces to be practiced and performed. Companies must design a framework for standardizing project management techniques within their strategic portfolio management environment.” While the music analogy appropriately recurs throughout the book, the material generally follows more traditional and expected topic areas. The content is divided into seven “steps,” including vision, values, best practices, and execution. These steps are described in separate chapters. For each step, Leonard recounts his own musical, personal, and business experiences; cites examples of successful organizations; includes specific implementation strategies; raises key questions; and provides additional resources. Especially helpful are the numerous lists the author presents to make the text more engaging. For example, he lists five areas to consider in preparing for organizational change, eight steps to developing best practices, 10 steps to strategic execution, and 11 common mistakes in the development of project portfolio management. Like many consultants, Leonard has devised his own methodology, and he generously shares it: He outlines and discusses a systematic process he calls “the ADeXI Framework” (which stands for Assess, Design, Execute, and Improve). He closes the volume by urging the reader to “turn up the bass on your favorite music device and in your organization, and enjoy those low tones that move your heart and that rattle your soul.” The author is obviously passionate about both music and project portfolio management, and his enthusiasm shines through the text. He deftly strikes the right balance between orchestral and project management nomenclature.
Nicely orchestrated and well-executed business advice.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73400-500-4
Page Count: 118
Publisher: PPM Academy Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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