This rare and engaging business manual should appeal equally to the manager’s inner surfer and the surfer’s inner manager.
A debut book applies the principles of surfing to the business world of the 21st century.
Wessinger’s volume intriguingly combines a memoir and a professional manifesto. He spends a good deal of the book’s early pages recounting his own experiences feeling dead-ended in the business universe and learning about the world of surfing off the coast of Malibu, California. With spirit and easy readability, the work details his formative experiences in sales and marketing and the rigors he endured (“I have firsthand experience with everything written in this book and have the mental and physical scars to prove it”). He alternates those stories with his account of overcoming his doubts and fears in order to learn surfing’s intricacies, which were at first intimidating and required new ways of problem-solving. The inspiration here is to marry the two worlds—to import into the realm of sales and marketing some of the basic tenets of surfing. “Surfers know how to leverage progression on wave after wave, and they can quickly move through a series of tricks and challenges to improve their surfing,” he explains. “The surfers that have mastered the process of building skills through progression will not stop and bask in their accomplishments.” In this view, companies that rely blindly on old patterns rather than continuously shifting their approaches to fit new situations are just asking to be swamped by the next big wave. Rather, the author maintains, companies should use risk, harnessing it to prod their thinking in new and necessary directions. Wessinger’s writing is clear and inviting, enlivened both by his frank honesty about himself and his hard-won understanding of business dealings. One core concept of his unconventional book is the idea of progression: the atmosphere of constant change that is the new normal of the business world. Some of his comments about this concept are basic enough almost to be truisms —the fact that successful companies survive by being responsive to their customers isn’t exactly a new discovery—but the author’s insights into the modern-day dynamics of that relationship are unfailingly captivating. “As customers become savvier about how they find information and make decisions about products or services,” he writes, “organizations will need to change to meet the customers’ new level of expertise.” That new reality in which customers are no longer dependent on sales or marketing to inform them about products and services—they can make assessments on their own—is neatly presented to mirror the case-by-case unpredictability of each wave a surfer rides. Wessinger’s blending of these two seemingly disparate worlds, a gimmick that could easily come across as strained and artificial, here feels smooth and valid, mainly because of the author’s plainspoken conviction.
This rare and engaging business manual should appeal equally to the manager’s inner surfer and the surfer’s inner manager.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63489-064-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Wise Creative Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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