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
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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