Illuminating—and liberating—advice for small-business owners.
An entrepreneur and efficiency expert discusses the importance of team-building, testing, time management, and more in this debut business startup guide.
For Crawford, a big trap that entrepreneurs fall into is doing everything themselves, bogging them down in tasks that could more effectively and efficiently be done by others. In this guide, he urges a focus on assembling a “small-business C-suite” of “five experts even the smallest of businesses can’t live without”—chief operating officer, chief legal officer, chief financial officer, chief human resources officer, and chief marketing officer—to free CEOs for the “laser focus” required to successfully launch and grow the products or services that they’re passionate about. He showcases the return on investment of this strategy by drawing on his own experiences launching shipping and legal businesses as well as other examples, including a detailed “Sue’s Bagels” startup scenario. He discusses how the use of technology (to automate and outsource business tasks, among other chores) gives small-business owners a level playing field and even an edge on their bigger competitors. He then segues into planning, recommending using the one-sheet Business Canvas Model, “as developed by theorist and author Alexander Osterwalder, with the help of 470 cocreators,” to determine value proposition, customer segments, and more. He emphasizes testing assumptions, with Sue’s Bagels, for example, transforming itself into an office-delivery service following the discovery that customers most valued convenience. Crawford covers issues requiring formal business documents (capital funding, incorporation, etc.) and concludes with his vision of time management, a lively Lego-type approach of prioritizing and grouping the “pieces” of one’s day. The author, an engaging and persuasive efficiency evangelist, offers excellent time- and money-saving tips to budding entrepreneurs. While he now has his own efficiency consulting business, and refers to it several times in this narrative, he is not overly self-promotional. Instead, he convincingly details the hidden costs, including work and life imbalances, that come from failing to leverage experts at the outset. While he touches on some topics (such as funding) too briefly at times, he always writes clearly and provides many helpful recaps along the way. Overall, this is an extremely valuable startup primer.
Illuminating—and liberating—advice for small-business owners.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-67123-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Redwood Digital Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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