A CEO’s readable and heartwarming story of building beds with love.
Ryde presents a business memoir promoting loving customer service.
In his nonfiction debut, the author, the fifth-generation CEO of the luxury bed manufacturer Hästens, immediately signals his intention to write an unconventional memoir about his experience running his company; he asks whether or not a business can really be founded on love, and then answers “yes.” Ryde views the purpose of his company as spreading “love, joy, peace, and abundance.” Writing about the company, which has its headquarters and warehouses in Köping, Sweden, Ryde takes readers on a tour of Hästens' 171-year history, in which the author’s ancestors first stuffed beds with horsetail hair (the company’s founders traveled to Egypt in search of the finest Arabian specimens). He traces the company’s fortunes all the way to the present, including his own initiatives since 1988 to boost its annual profits. “After I had been working at Hästens for a year or two,” he writes in the affectionate tone that characterizes the whole book, “my aunties came to me and told me how grateful they were that I was there, working to revive the company.” From these stories, he expands on a general philosophy of kindness and empathy that extends to both employees and customers. Ryde is a tremendously charismatic presence on the page, bursting with a cheerfulness that makes his anecdotes and precepts sound extremely winning. But readers (especially those working in retail or entrepreneurial spaces themselves) will immediately spot the Achilles heel of Ryde’s viewpoint: Hästens’ beds can cost many thousands of dollars apiece and are made with slow, elaborate, individual care—circumstances which tend to make it easier to lavish love on every customer. But his heart’s in the right place, and readers will appreciate his storytelling skills.
A CEO’s readable and heartwarming story of building beds with love.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781637631973
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forefront Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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