Full of sturdy, old-school leadership wisdom, a pleasant view from the top of a century of business.
A captain of industry chronicles an extraordinary life in the beauty business.
Lauder (b. 1933) tells both his own story and that of his mother, Estée Lauder (1908-2004), founder of the eponymous cosmetics company. Born Josephine Esther Mentzer, she got experience in the business world as a child, helping out in her father’s hardware store and a department store called Plafker & Rosenthal. At the time, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein owned the cosmetics industry, but as Estée pioneered the ideas of individual consultations and free gifts (her husband, Joe, mixed the creams in the kitchen), her star began to climb. Leonard began working in the plant at age 13; to put himself to sleep, he would “mentally check off all the specialty stores we sold to.” In 1958, he “officially” joined the company, which “barely had a dozen employees, including my parents and me.” He set his course early on: "My dream was to make Estée Lauder the General Motors of the beauty business, with multiple brands, multiple product lines, and multinational distribution.” He also dreamed, literally, of tinted lip gloss, which didn't exist at the time, and put it into production immediately. A watershed moment occurred during college, when his film club became so successful he started a second club to compete against it. This experience emboldened him to create Clinique, Origins, and Prescriptives and later to acquire Aveda, MAC, and others. “Competing against myself,” writes Lauder, “is an idea that never grows old.” Against the changing backdrop of 20th-century retail, the author describes his battles with the “ruthless” Charles Revson of Revlon and the later "Lancôme Wars." The final chapters detail Lauder’s successes as an art collector and philanthropist. The author is such a consistently genial guide that he even makes the rigors of the Navy—he joined after being rejected from Harvard Business School—seem charming.
Full of sturdy, old-school leadership wisdom, a pleasant view from the top of a century of business.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-299094-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2021
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
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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