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 clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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