A richly detailed and context-heavy guidebook for improving corporate directorship.
Foster, the founder and managing partner of Current Capital Partners, offers a set of precepts for improving corporate management.
With this work, the author aims to provide a corporate handbook for an ever-changing business world by basing it on four tenets: that the board of directors oversees management, but management handles the details of a business; that directors should be held entirely accountable; that mergers and acquisitions or leveraged buyouts should be viewed as “a significant part of the corporate landscape”; and that corporations should be aware that their role in society is in the midst of a period of intense debate. With all these tenets in mind, Foster then turns to his central subject: the idea of corporate governance. He offers a brief overview of the history of this concept and shares many quotes from people who are in positions to insightfully comment. For example, he speaks to former White House chief of staff under the Biden administration and current chief legal officer for Airbnb Ron Klain: “The president is the chair of the board and in some ways the entire board himself,” Klain observes. “What you’re trying to do is muster the organization to achieve his or her goals and objectives.” Throughout, these expert outside voices complement Foster’s when addresses every phase of corporate directorship, in good times and bad. Former bankruptcy judge Shelley Chapman, for instance, talks with the author about the “very big challenge and responsibility” of being the director of a distressed company, and how that circumstance changes the balance of priorities.
This personalized contextualization gives Foster’s book a steadily accumulating feeling of authority. While discussing each aspect of corporate leadership, the author presents real-world examples, as in the case of Nikola, a maker of alternative-fuel trucks that was led into chaos by its former chief executive: “Inaccurate disclosures by a company, particularly by its chair and/or CEO, can cause a crisis,” Foster writes, adding commentary from current Nikola CEO Steve Girsky to hammer home the lesson: “Having a group of independent directors is valuable,” that executive tells Foster. “You want people who are comfortable with discomfort.” The remit of Foster’s book is deliberately narrow, mainly tailored to his fellow executives and C-suite directors; however, his consistent grounding of precepts in pragmatic examples—often narrated by the people who were there at the time—will certainly increase the book’s value for that readership. Foster repeatedly asserts that corporate governance has grown stronger over the past generation, and he offers his book as a way to lay the groundwork for future improvement. Specifically, he urges companies not only to think about their shareholders, but also to take into account a broader crowd of stakeholders: the people and communities affected by their decisions. These stakeholders will likely be happy to note this book’s consistent tone of moral uprightness and ethical responsibility—although more cynical readers, noting numerous examples of modern-day corporate corruption, may wonder if anybody’s listening.
A richly detailed and context-heavy guidebook for improving corporate directorship.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798895150146
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Radius Book Group
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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