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
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 clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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