A well-organized and engagingly written book about learning from losses.
A fresh look at how businesses fail and succeed.
In this debut book, Ananth—the CEO of venture firm Next47 who’s worked for such major technology companies as Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard—explores the main reasons why business decisions don’t work out. He groups them into seven primary categories: failure to appeal to customers’ needs, technology issues, poor product quality, unsuccessful teams, bad timing, poor business models, and troubled execution. The book looks at a range of real-world examples, such as how cutting-edge gyroscopes and accelerometers weren’t enough to get the Segway transportation device past such hurdles as insufficient infrastructure and an unshakeable perception of nerdiness. Ananth contrasts consumers’ responses to the Apple Newton and PalmPilot, two personal digital devices with similar aims that took different approaches to the marketplace, and he explains how the maker of the Tata Nano automobile identified a substantial gap in India’s transportation options but failed to understand customers’ motivations and perceptions: “No one wanted to tell the world that they had bought a cheap car because that was all they could afford.” Scooter-sharing services illustrate the problem of basing a company on an unsustainable business model, and the music company EMI’s move into CT scanner manufacturing serves as an example of how the first company to develop a technology isn’t always the one that’s commercially successful. Each chapter presents companies that have avoided such obstacles, as well, and presents lessons along with coaching sessions designed to guide readers toward the best decisions.
Overall, this book is full of useful, actionable information while remaining a quick and easy read thanks to Ananth’s no-frills, conversational prose style and a wealth of intriguing subject matter. Readers will appreciate that the author generally stays away from business jargon (with the noteworthy exception of the repeated term go-to-market) and keeps the Silicon Valley name-dropping to a reasonable level, piquing readers’ interest without becoming grating. The book does a good job of treating business failures as learning opportunities rather than existential disasters or moral crises and also shows how leaders’ decisions went wrong without making personal judgments about the decision-makers. At the same time, Ananth makes it clear that successfully implementing his book’s lessons isn’t easy to accomplish, and he highlights several businesspeople who are celebrated for high-profile wins while showing how these same people lost in equally spectacular ways. The thematic organization of these stories is an effective device, as it makes the book’s overall logic clear and easy to follow. Ananth shows a talent for selecting anecdotes that are most likely to capture a reader’s interest while also effectively illustrating a key concept. Overall, he proves himself to be a fine storyteller, always placing the book’s narrative ahead of its didactic qualities. With its attractive presentation and solid information, the work is sure to appeal to avid readers of business literature, and it will particularly attract those in search of high-level and nontechnical analysis delivered concisely and coherently.
A well-organized and engagingly written book about learning from losses.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64687-072-1
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2021
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
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
