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
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
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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