A forceful, clear, and detailed method for strengthening prioritization.
Max presents a variety of tools and tactics for making smarter business decisions in this guide.
The author, an executive coaching consultant, repeatedly stresses the importance of setting priorities in the business world: “If you don’t know your priorities,” he writes, “there’s no real engine that is driving your planning.” For companies and organizations, priorities are essential for survival, per Max, “but to thrive, their priorities must mesh like gears to synchronize the work that teams are planning and doing, so they can make progress consistently and predictably.” The author is aware of the frequency of distractions and time-sinks in the corporate world and the abundance of issues that are “urgent but not important.” In these pages, he offers strategies for clarifying priorities at various levels of significance. Most of these approaches employ a prioritization process model called DEGAP, consisting of five phases: Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, and, finally, Prioritize, which pulls all the earlier phases together. Max elaborates on all of these directives and provides further tools for sharpening the focus of prioritization, including the “Impact/Effort Matrix” and the “Situation Checklist,” the latter of which highlights circumstances in which prioritizing would be most essential, from launching a turnaround of some kind to scaling an operation up or down. Max writes with a tone of frank understanding that runs throughout the book, even when he’s recommending a very simple procedure, like making a to-do list: “Weirdly, the vast majority of people undervalue the power of a simple checklist for avoiding unintended negative consequences.” Readers feeling swamped by choices and competing calls for their attention will find the author’s consistent clarity of vision both refreshing and valuable—the techniques he outlines could untangle just about any institutional tangle. Max’s long experience is evident on every page.
A forceful, clear, and detailed method for strengthening prioritization.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781959029007
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Two Waves Books
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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