A valuable book full of lessons for business students and would-be leaders.
The former CEO of GE writes candidly about the successes and failures of his tenure.
The son of a GE worker, Immelt assumed the top position in 2001 after rising through the ranks as the company was being reshaped by former CEO Jack Welch. He opens his memoir by recounting a discomfiting couple of hours at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where one student asked point-blank, “How could you let this happen?” The “this” in question was a long decline as Immelt tried to shift the culture and direction of a company “where perception didn’t equal reality.” As the author writes ruefully, ideas were scarce and inertia reigned. His leadership lessons are both hortatory (“Leaders show up”) and critical. He writes, for instance, that Welch had surrounded himself with yes men and gotten bogged down in faddish management tools such as Six Sigma even as the company was overrun by finance types at the expense of engineers. By the time he took over, the largest share of GE’s business came from its insurance sector rather than from anything it made. “Transforming a big legacy company requires persistence,” writes the author. It also requires the right aides and key staff, and in this, Immelt was ill-served by ambitious managers—one in particular he thinks he should have fired despite that person’s being protected by the board of directors. He also opines that his successor as CEO, whose tenure was brief, was the wrong person for the job: “It seemed to me,” he writes, “that [John] Flannery couldn’t make decisions.” In the end, Immelt writes in an unforgivingly self-critical spirit, he took on too many projects. “I did not develop a deep enough bench of rising leaders” to help with these initiatives, he writes, adding, “I wish I had said ‘I don’t know’ more frequently.”
A valuable book full of lessons for business students and would-be leaders.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982114-71-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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