An unexpectedly thoughtful guide to rethinking one’s business strategies.
Berry challenges would-be entrepreneurs to know less in this debut business manual.
Although naïveté is not normally seen as a virtue, going by its original meaning—to be genuine and authentic—it hardly seems like a bad thing. “Many of the successful leaders I interviewed for this book used the phrase ‘this might sound naive…’ and then proceeded to share an amazing idea, business practice, or truth,” writes the author, a consultant who advises companies on workplace culture, in his introduction. “Eventually, I learned that this fear of being naive was actually preventingme from having a greater impact in business and life.” Actively choosing to be naive can help people set aside their egos, admit what they don’t know, and open themselves to new possibilities. With this guide, Berry seeks to re-introduce naïveté into the business mindset, where it can help entrepreneurs and executives escape groupthink and outdated conventional wisdom. As he breaks down the various aspects of the concept, the author provides the reader with numerous stories of businesspeople—some famous, some not—whose embrace of naïveté has helped rocket them to success. There’s Yvon Chouinard, the rock climber who famously turned his passion for the outdoors into a revolutionary and sustainable recreational clothing brand; Chip Conley, the boutique hotelier whose desire to do good turned him into a maverick of the hospitality industry; and Jeff Cherry, whose commitment to conscious capitalism caused him to rethink the way that startups attract investors. Along the way, the book challenges the conventional assumptions people make about how companies operate: what goals they should strive for, what underlying values should inform their mission, and how they might achieve one without compromising the other. If that sounds overly idealistic—perhaps, even, a bit naive—well, that’s the point.
Berry’s prose style is calm and nonjudgmental. He offers anecdotes of business leaders as parables, presenting them for the reader to ponder. Appropriately, given the book’s topic, he models a kind of meandering inquisitiveness: “So what do you think?” he asks his reader frequently. “Is it foolish to put so much trust in workers, to unlock the tools and do away with time cards? How much control are you willing to give up as a leader in order to give that control to the employees? What do your practices today say about your beliefs in other humans?” Each chapter ends with a reflective exercise that prompts readers to consider their own long-held beliefs. For all the skepticism that readers may have at the outset, the author’s argument proves disarming. By framing a certain school of outside-the-box thinking as naïveté, he makes it appear accessible to everyone, even if the execs he chooses to profile are not precisely representative of the population at large. In doing so, Berry imagines a less predatory style of business, one motivated more by a concern for the well-being of people than by the need to endlessly increase profitability—a vision that should carry particular resonance in our current economic moment.
An unexpectedly thoughtful guide to rethinking one’s business strategies.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64687-152-0
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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