Inspiring stories that provide critical insights into how women-founded companies begin, operate, and prosper.
An investigation of women leaders and how they “have been able to turn genuine grievance into entrepreneurial grit.”
Boorstin, the senior media and tech correspondent for CNBC and a former reporter for Fortune, is interested in the differences between companies founded by women and those established by men. The author examines more than 60 companies, and all of her interviewees encountered huge obstacles. Some of the most telling statistics relate to venture capital funding. “Female founders consistently draw less than 3 percent of all venture capital dollars,” writes Boorstin, “and it is VC funding that enabled companies such as Facebook, Google, and Airbnb to spend years losing money while growing.” Furthermore, “when female entrepreneurs do successfully raise venture funding, they generally raise less than half as much as their male counterparts.” Many VC investors look for brash, hyperconfident optimism from CEOs seeking funding, and women founders tend to be more circumspect and cautious. However, Boorstin clearly shows that when women make it past the starting line, their companies often outperform the market. They intend their companies to become lasting enterprises, whereas men are more likely to dash for growth in order to cash in on the company via sale or initial public offering. Women are also more likely to work at building resilience and reserves into the company’s architecture, a strategy that turned out to be crucial when the pandemic hit. They begin to build a reliable team very early in the company’s life, often looking for a diversity of skills and opinions. Boorstin provides sufficient data showing the positive impact of diversity and argues convincingly that the best counter to bias is citing the profitability figures and performance evidence for women-led firms. Thankfully, many of the successful entrepreneurs in this book have set up mechanisms to support the next generation.
Inspiring stories that provide critical insights into how women-founded companies begin, operate, and prosper.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982168-21-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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
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
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