Actionable solutions for senior corporate leaders that will also make engaging reading for others interested in business...
This debut guide, penned by several professors, addresses contemporary threats that can face any type of business.
The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, arguably Canada’s leading business school, funded this intriguing book—a compilation of observations about various “strategic threats” to businesses, including failures of systems, escalating internal costs, or public relations debacles. Eleven Rotman professors tackle some of the most compelling issues in a far-ranging work that covers such topics as health care, gender diversity, corporate reputation management, and innovation. Each of the nine scrupulously researched chapters stands very much on its own; the book’s editors, professors Gans and Kaplan, provide an introduction and conclusion, stressing the essays’ commonalities. For example, they eloquently highlight “common organizational mistakes” in companies that fail to recognize threats. They also discuss the concept of “structured anticipation” as a way to understand and prepare for risks. Business leaders will likely find Gans and Kaplan’s content alone to be highly beneficial. They’ve carefully curated the other chapters to represent a broad range of subject matter, although each pinpoints a potential crisis area with precision, using specific examples and relevant research. One sobering chapter by Andras Tilcsik addressing catastrophic failures, for example, cites two divergent cases: the hardware failure that caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 and the software failure that caused Knight Capital Group, a large Wall Street trader, to lose $460 million in 2012. Tilcsik then offers six specific “interventions that can improve decisions, strengthen complex systems, and reduce catastrophic risks.” Another chapter, “The Challenge of Gender Diversity,” by Kaplan, explores “the underlying reasons that discriminatory outcomes occur even with the best of intentions” and presents several research-based solutions. Gans and Kaplan conclude by saying that they intend to update the work “as new research comes to light.” Overall, despite its multiple authors, this is a highly focused, elegantly written treatise.
Actionable solutions for senior corporate leaders that will also make engaging reading for others interested in business challenges.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 147
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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