A nicely balanced personal and practical book of corporate reflections and hard-won business lessons.
A successful entrepreneur tells his story and provides guidance for others seeking a similar path.
Smulyan, founder and CEO of Indianapolis-based Emmis Communications Corporation, offers a pleasing amalgam of business guide and memoir. The author begins by chronicling his humble beginnings in a Midwest Jewish family in which entrepreneurial roots ran deep. Though he developed an early passion for radio, his father steered him toward a law degree for the “instant credibility a master’s degree won’t give you.” After operating WNTS, a small Indianapolis radio station (“These days, WNTS is known for its original midday host, David Letterman”), Smulyan branched out to own stations in other markets, experimented with diversified formats like religious and all-sports broadcasting, and eventually founded Emmis Communications, a company that expanded to include TV stations and magazines. In 1989, Smulyan led a group of investors in the acquisition of the Seattle Mariners, a problematic proposition that the author recounts candidly. Sprinkled throughout the shrewd text are accounts of impressive ratings for Emmis’ top radio stations and anecdotes about the personal and professional sacrifices that became necessary to keep Emmis profitable amid dot-com crashes and recessions. Smulyan fair-mindedly contrasts his major successes against his failures and near misses, some of which nearly cost him everything. He takes readers on a largely entertaining behind-the-scenes tour of the tumultuous nature of a struggling business and illuminates the uniquely challenging economics involved in the media and sports worlds. Smulyan, now 74 and still working, clearly believes in the classic principles of hard work and lifelong learning as well as the understanding that “to succeed, you absolutely have to know how to handle failure.” He dispenses sage advice on the power of effective leadership, business ethics, and integrity, and the rewarding benefits of fostering a collaborative corporate culture.
A nicely balanced personal and practical book of corporate reflections and hard-won business lessons.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63774-222-8
Page Count: 330
Publisher: BenBella
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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