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
A vigorous and highly readable plan for building the finances of a new business.
A program of cash-management techniques for aspiring entrepreneurs, aimed at a minority readership.
At the beginning of this business book, Mariga reflects on the birth of her daughter, Florence, and on the depressing prospect of returning to her corporate job and missing some of her baby’s early moments. She realized that she “wanted to show Florence…that I could, that she could, that anyone could be anything they wanted to be in this world.” To that end, she wanted to start her own business, and she “wanted to help entrepreneurs build successful businesses that provide opportunities for others.” In a sentiment reflected by others she’s interviewed, she says that she wanted to strengthen her family legacy, so she founded her own accounting firm. She paints a vivid picture of the hardscrabble early days of other minority business owners like herself, the child of an African American mother and a Chinese father who also had a family accounting business. She and others were “all hustling to acquire clients and build our businesses…and most of us had absolutely nothing to show for it.” She was inspired by Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First money management system, and the bulk of her book is devoted to an explanation of how to make this system work for minority business enterprises. (Michalowicz provides a foreword to the book.) One of the primary goals of Profit First is to build “a self-sustaining, debt-free company,” so a large part of Mariga’s work deals with the details of managing finances, building and abiding by budgets, and handling the swings of emotion that occur every step of the way. As sharply focused as these insights are, the author’s recollections of her own experiences are more rewarding, as when she tells readers of her brief time as a cut-rate accountant and learning that it was a mistake to try to compete on price. These stories, as well as financing specifics and clear encouragements (“Small changes and adjustments accumulate. Over time, they will lead you to your goal”), will make this book invaluable to entrepreneurs of all kinds.
A vigorous and highly readable plan for building the finances of a new business.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7357759-0-6
Page Count: 230
Publisher: The Avant-Garde Project, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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