An effective, single-minded primer on maximizing profit when exiting a business.
A précis on successfully selling a startup.
Iseri, the founder of health-tech company SwipeSense, and Achler, a founding partner of MATH Venture Partners, focus on helping younger entrepreneurs sell their businesses in this concise and well-organized debut book, which provides readers with a thorough, well-organized plan of action using the “FAIR framework,” which defines and examines the “Fit, Alignment, Integration, and Rationale” at the heart of the relationship between a startup’s founders and its acquirers. Its accessible, highly readable format seems specifically geared to fostering a sense of agency, moving from anecdotes regarding specific, real-life sales to philosophical questions about who to trust in what can be a cutthroat environment. The book is effectively anchored by dual forewords; James Jack, head of UBS Global Wealth Management, praises the authors for their focus on training entrepreneurs to have a long-term, realistic perspective on one of the most important events in their business lives, and entrepreneur and venture capitalist Brad Feld considers the work to be a sort of sequel to his own treatise on funding startups. Together, they provide a sense of gravitas to the work and give impressive credit to its authors for their targeted strategy of finding trustworthy partners, maximizing value, and looking toward future deals. Ultimately, this book provides plenty of useful advice for budding entrepreneurs, with negotiation tips and guides for organizing one’s finances taking center stage. Throughout, Iseri and Achler make clear that achieving the highest returns is their primary goal; in the opening pages they note, “We all know that you’re supposed to focus on your customers and your team and not worry about the exit, but let’s face it: we all do it.” As such, the work may disappoint readers who might be expecting a work that treats customers in a more holistic manner. However, the book does point out that entrepreneurs should be cleareyed about their goals and potential outcomes, which helps to ground the work.
An effective, single-minded primer on maximizing profit when exiting a business.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2599-0
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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