A readable and forceful breakdown of marketing tactics honed to military sharpness.
Pepper lays out a business game plan using military principles.
“Digital marketing [has] upset the apple cart, so to speak, and the traditional methods [are] no longer as effective as they used to be,” writes the author, a United States Army veteran and successful marketing specialist, in his nonfiction debut. In these pages, Pepper reminds those working in the marketing field that they were not hired to maintain the status quo (disruption is going to find them anyway). He proceeds to map centuries-old successful military strategies onto the world of modern marketing (“When people ask me what’s the latest marketing book I’ve come across, I reply, ‘Caesar’s Commentaries’”), adding lessons he’s learned from his extensive experience in the civilian business world, where change is also the key. “Transformation is at the core of successful relationship marketing,” he writes, reinforcing this and other precepts with quotes from famous military thinkers and icons like General George S. Patton. The author’s own experience, he stresses, underscores the superiority of transformational relationships in marketing over merely transactional ones, and he discusses the various obstacles he’s encountered in managing people and encountering institutional resistance. Often, his main barrier was the Dunning-Kruger effect, “a cognitive bias in which people with less ability and knowledge in an area overestimate their competence.” Pepper does a very engaging job of conveying his corporate experiences, particularly as chief marketing officer for Foundations Recovery Network, but some readers may feel like they’re getting too much autobiography and not enough strategizing. Fortunately, the author effectively invokes famed military experts like von Clausewitz, and his conviction is infectious when noting that CMOs must always feel confident that they will not be outmatched. Pepper’s clear-sighted maxims will doubtlessly motivate and inspire readers who are dealing with the volatile nature of 21st-century marketing.
A readable and forceful breakdown of marketing tactics honed to military sharpness.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781637634615
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2025
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
IN THE NEWS
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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