Complex and visually stimulating; a serious blueprint for serious strategists.
Drotar and Morrissey present a product development strategy centered on revamping core methods in this business guide.
In these pages, the authors (co-founders of product development firm Strategy 2 Market) describe their original Exploratory Product Development, or ExPD, concept to help companies improve their processes and practices when approaching everything from interacting with (and learning from) customers to streamlining the delivery of products and services. Considering the complex state into which these enterprises have developed, Drotar and Morrissey assert that institutional adaptability is more important than ever and that “successful projects have competent managers who are involved but not too involved.” The “exploratory learning” the authors advocate is outwardly focused and premised on being adaptable enough to develop new competencies and create new models as complex situations evolve. The authors use a series of case studies to illustrate their core principles for developing a flexible, adaptable “strategy-to-launch” process for delivering products and adjusting to all kinds of factors, from external pressures to personnel complications. Drotar and Morrissey repeatedly stress both the value of detailed knowledge and the importance of having the flexibility to alter course when some of that knowledge turns out to be wrong or irrelevant. A primary goal of their ExPD approach, they write, is “to reduce the product uncertainty that derives from unknowns.” They proceed methodically through every stage of product development and delivery, breaking down every step into its component parts and analyzing each in turn. This compartmentalized approach is maintained throughout: “We recommend breaking the activities into small increments,” they write, “which helps the team to be focused, fast, and budget-conscious.”
The first thing that will strike readers is the effort the authors have put in to making the text of their book inviting. Key concepts are bullet-pointed, key lines are delivered in pull quotes, and a variety of graphics are employed throughout to keep the reading experience from bogging down or becoming visually tedious (and to help readers more readily find the specific things they’re looking for). These kinds of easy-access features will be all the more appreciated by readers, as the actual text, when laying out the concepts and strategies, is often dauntingly technical—in many ways, the book very much feels like a guide for business graduate students who already know concepts like fuzzy gates and overlapping phases. In a typical passage, Drotar and Morrissey write, “Despite easing some process rigidity, the structure of the process is maintained. The nature and order of activities and deliverables are still prescribed, and decisions are deferred to the gates.” Readers already familiar with such terms will find the authors to be bracingly forthright and readable guides; those requiring a more introductory approach may find themselves scrambling to keep up as the text proceeds full steam ahead while discussing cross-functional teams. Some of the guidance in these pages is almost comically simple—listen to your customers, carefully plan each of your development stages—but the great majority of the book’s advice is formidably technical.
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2022
ISBN: 9781732749221
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Strategy 2 Market, Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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