Slightly better than average: a cautionary business tale for readers of Forbes and Fortune.
Or, how to lose a gazillion dollars in ten easy lessons.
Craig Winn, a born salesman, was a great believer in formulas to explain how the world works, preaching “the seven things consumers wanted from an online store, the five things that brands needed, and the five key principles of e-commerce.” Having endured trial by combat, selling such things as flyswatters, plastic cups, smoke alarms, and lighting fixtures, he believed with diamondlike intensity that his brainchild, Value America, was destined to be a huge hit. And how could it not be? A one-stop online mall in which nothing was unattainable, writes former corporate-communications director Kuo, Value America “would be for the Internet age what Harrods was for the entire British Empire at its height: the shopping source for all things.” It was an inspired vision, all right, but one whose balance sheet looked a little fuzzy from the start, especially after the bankers—who are supposed to be conservative, or so we’ve been told—convinced Winn that what counted was not solvency and cash sales, but spending hundreds of millions of dollars simply to lure in Web strollers, whose mere presence made a given piece of Internet real estate valuable. Whereas Winn had planned to value the company, founded in 1996, on actual revenues—as such things once worked in the world—those bankers “demanded that the company be valued based on revenues two years out. . . . In other words, if Value America got $50 million in funding in 1997 and believed that it could use that money to get $100 million in revenues in 1998 . . . the company would be valued at least two times those 1999 forecasts—or, according to this scenario, at $400 million.” The funny-money accounting, as much as any other failing, drove Value America under, as it did so many e-commerce concerns in the dark days of 2000. Though his writing is often glib and self-congratulatory, Kuo tells the story with a mix of wonky business detail and profile-style journalism, down to the last grisly moment, when “Value America was dead [and] all that was left were the spasms.”
Slightly better than average: a cautionary business tale for readers of Forbes and Fortune.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-50749-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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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