A bracing call for strengthening diversity fueled by stories of people on the front lines working to do just that.
Bamforth and Zwahlen present a blueprint for more effective entrepreneurship centering around five key ideas.
The authors open their book about entrepreneurship with an overview that takes in both the unprecedented opportunities America offers for innovation and startups and the stark unevenness of the American social landscape. As they note, average life expectancy in some parts of Chicago can be 30 years higher than in neighboring ZIP codes, and many of these inequalities break along racial lines. Bamforth and Zwahlen write that “Black entrepreneurs and Black businesses are under-capitalized, under-resourced, and insufficiently supported,” which makes the entire nation “many times poorer” as a result. The authors claim the market benefits from improving levels of diversity, equity, and inclusion to foster innovation and build prosperity. On the road to this goal, they mark out five “road signs” identifying best practices; these include recognizing potential, harnessing the power of enclaves, enabling ownership, using the “unique lens” that can be provided by diverse entrepreneurs and innovators, and “accelerating transformative change” to “seize opportunities, grow, and build value at an accelerated pace.” In these pages, Bamforth and Zwahlen and their guest contributors employ a number of formats, from bulleted summaries to industry case studies to interviews with innovators, to flesh out these basic principles.
This varied approach makes the book smoothly readable. The authors effectively buttress their broader thoughts on diversity and entrepreneurship with specific examples, including profiles of some of the many people doing the work on the ground. They tell the story of Marcus Whitney, for instance, the co-starter of a fund for health care startups who angrily corresponded with the Nashville Health Care Leadership Council about its lack of support for the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020. “How is it possible,” Whitney asks, addressing institutional racial imbalances, “that the nation’s leading healthcare services cluster has generated incredible wealth for White people in Nashville but no meaningful wealth for Nashville’s Black community?” Bamforth and Zwahlen also profile Shuchin Shukla, a son of Indian immigrants who served in rural, impoverished communities in Appalachia ravaged by the opioid epidemic. “His level of talent and commitment,” the authors write, nodding to the advantages of diversity, “could not have been recruited without a hands-on, deeply embedded approach to ideation and problem-solving.” Bamforth and Zwahlen also skillfully incorporate brief vignettes from the history of diversity struggles, such as the “fight of the century” between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling in 1938, which Louis won in a knockout (“The celebrations in Black neighborhoods lasted for days”). Running throughout all these stories, carefully highlighted by the authors but never overstressed, are “associations between diversity, innovation, and performance.” Readers not as enthused about the subject as Bamforth and Zwahlen may find some of those associations a bit elusive, but the powerful examples found on virtually every page combine to form a convincing argument that inclusion and equity are practical keys to improving entrepreneurship for all communities.
A bracing call for strengthening diversity fueled by stories of people on the front lines working to do just that.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781646871858
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
