Valuable, inspiring arguments for a more thoughtful approach to building a successful company.
A former “ruthless” commercial real estate broker makes the case for selfless business models in this debut book.
As the child of Christian missionaries living in Papua New Guinea, Keyser grew up helping those with even less than his parents had. After the family’s eventual return to the United States, his parents struggled financially, trying to survive on his mother’s meager salary as a teacher, but they still managed to give back to the community. The author soon left this benevolent world behind for UCLA, where he set his sights on making money. He eventually learned to lie “with sincerity” as a commercial real estate broker and achieved great success by misleading clients and stealing opportunities from co-workers—the norm in that business. But at a conference in Miami, Keyser was introduced to a radical idea that merged the triumphs he expected with the teachings of his childhood: a model for developing long-term relationships that could be based on selfless service to others. He soon began helping people with no expectation of reward or compensation and ultimately built a client base more robust and loyal than any that could be forged with back-stabbing tactics and traditional sales strategies. He has since taken this idea into his own firm and established himself as a “thought leader” in the industry, hoping to motivate others to take on his methods of service, “flat structure” (without traditional hierarchy), and an inclusive, caring company culture. The author wisely divides his book into two sections, the first being autobiographical and the second more of a guide to implementing his model. His personal anecdotes are succinct and revealing—such as the humiliating childhood moment when his principal realized he only owned one pair of jeans—and they all play into his larger argument for assisting others in order to help one’s business. The lengthier how-to section’s main arguments and buzzwords, like “being present” and “being disruptive,” become slightly repetitive, but Keyser complements his writing with extensive further reading lists and short, useful summaries. The tactics he has used in his own firm also go far beyond the world of real estate, touching on how gratitude, honesty, and service can improve just about any team dynamic.
Valuable, inspiring arguments for a more thoughtful approach to building a successful company.Pub Date: July 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0424-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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