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
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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