by Jennifer Mueller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 2017
Solid reading for the business set though no substitute for books by Twyla Tharp, Daniel Dennett, and other creative...
Of innovation and its great enemy, inertia.
We face huge problems, not least of them, writes social psychologist Mueller (Management/Univ. of San Diego), the fact that the end-of-the-world clock that ticked so loudly during the Cold War has now landed on “three minutes to midnight.” Huge problems require huge solutions, and huge solutions require creativity. But how does creativity flourish in cultures that are unused or even hostile to it? Some of our inability to leverage creativity can be linked to familiar human risk-averse behavior—and because she’s a psychologist, Mueller goes straight to Ellsberg, Tversky, and other textbook examples—and some to the odd fact that while current corporate jargon places a high value on innovation, innovation is not really what the vaunted “continuous improvement” mantra really entails. Mueller looks at models for disrupting the chain of inertia and breaking some of the barriers to good ideas. She observes that certain problem-coping methods encode different requirements for structure and offer different levels of uncertainty and risk, for good and bad; institutions particularly crave structure because it yields measurable outcomes, while softer approaches may not net immediately quantifiable results. This is puzzling given that most CEOs identify creativity as “the number-one leadership competency to win in the future.” Even so, the wheels turn slowly: one noteworthy innovation in measuring customer satisfaction took two years to run through the necessary channels, and this from the company’s chief innovation officer. Suggesting a host of mindset-altering exercises for organizations, Mueller ventures the thought that maybe metrics aren’t everything in arriving at a culture that is more conducive to creative thinking. As she notes in conclusion, “once we accept that our metrics are not themselves the answers but rather that they are the path to the answers, we are no longer limited by fear.”
Solid reading for the business set though no substitute for books by Twyla Tharp, Daniel Dennett, and other creative thinkers.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-70309-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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More by Sheldon Whitehouse
BOOK REVIEW
by Sheldon Whitehouse with Jennifer Mueller
by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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