A thorough analysis of the necessity of planning for an economic disaster and a well-articulated system to achieve it.
A debut business book offers a strategic proposal that prepares company owners for inevitable financial challenges and finds opportunities within them.
Slain and Belair had starkly different experiences when the recession hit in 2008. Slain was the owner of fitness franchises and was unprepared for a sharp downturn in demand for the services he sold. He was only able to survive by borrowing $250,000 from his mother-in-law. In contrast, Belair ran “a national specialty contracting company,” one he bought prior to the recession and sold after it for a huge financial windfall. The two authors devised a system—the Recession Readiness Assessment™—formulated to both appraise a company’s current state of health and help fortify current weaknesses before the cyclically inevitable occurs: a recession, broadly defined as “any big shock to a company’s system.” The assessment is a collection of 20 questions divided into five sections, each one corresponding to a gear in a gearbox—assess (first gear), tune (second gear), race (third gear), and accelerate (fourth gear), plus an emergency brake, the pulling of which means one begins cutting overhead to remain profitable. Executives always start in first gear. Then the astutely composed questions, combined with a diagnosis of the economy’s health, help them determine which gear to choose next. The authors offer sensibly prudent and consistently lucid counsel regarding not just the importance of preparation for disaster, but also its nature. The assessment itself, provided in full in the book, will at the very least serve as a valuable diagnostic tool. Some of the questions may be obvious, especially those pertaining to available cash and debt, but others are both important and easily overlooked. For example, the authors suggest taking a hard look at the financial worthiness of the vendors a company relies on. The prose can be unctuously ingratiating, unfortunately common in business guides: “We’re almost at the end of the book. Are you ready to Rock the Recession?” But the authors provide a genuinely useful discussion of recession-preparedness and a usefully actionable tool for its judicious establishment.
A thorough analysis of the necessity of planning for an economic disaster and a well-articulated system to achieve it.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0191-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Recession.com LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
