Perhaps not for the general public, but a must-have for those in the business of business.
A lively and informative narrative of product-based entrepreneurship in the virtual-product age, by business-school roommates who built and sold a better mouse.
A computer mouse, that is, and shaped like a golf driver at that. Lusk and Harrison were both on track to graduate from Wharton in 1999, with career prospects of an eminently respectable and highly lucrative sort regularly dangled before them. They chose instead to create a company called Platinum Concepts, whose first product was said mouse resembling the head of a golf driver. Harrison took the title of president; Lusk became marketing vice-president. They designed their product, developed business and marketing plans, and established their company base in their San Francisco apartment. Adventures and misadventures followed on the road to profit. Product samples manufactured in Hong Kong arrived; design adjustments consumed considerable time and energy. They learned that the buying period for the Christmas retail season had already passed and realized they had neglected key aspects of product distribution, essential to wholesale-to-retail marketing. New strategies were developed, and the company made its first sale: 200 MouseDrivers to Bank of America. Assorted personalities the company encountered included a nearly narcoleptic sales representative and a psycho-gonzo retail consultant; successes included contacts established with suppliers in the promotional products industry and at trade shows. The company made a profit, and the tale ends with Platinum Concepts still solvent and operational. The authors’ story is as clean and fast as a Tiger Woods tee-shot; they share copious amounts of information with generosity, humor, and all-American spirit.
Perhaps not for the general public, but a must-have for those in the business of business.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7382-0573-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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 readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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