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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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