An engaging book of expert business-survival advice for a troubled time.
A debut collection of essays about automation in the business world.
“If we concede reason to instinct, we forfeit the greatest survival mechanism of all, the ability to adapt,” writes chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in his foreword to this densely packed anthology. “This isn't a chess insight, or business strategy; it’s basic Darwinism.” The invocation of survival is apt, as today’s troubled economy hangs over the contents of Calkins’ book, which asserts the need for businesses to adapt quickly in the face of abruptly changing customer needs. Long before the Covid-19 pandemic, complicated software was becoming, as the author puts it, the spinal cord of business, and it’s become even more vital now, he says. “Companies today need to be ready at all times to write an application on which their business might depend,” he writes. “The new mandate is for agility in all applications, especially the most important ones.” Calkins, the CEO of enterprise technology company Appian, clarifies that the automation to which he’s referring is not the old conception of the replacement of humans with machines but rather the increasing combination of humans, artificial intelligence, and robotics in the workplace. In these pages, he assembles a collection of essays by CEOs and experts that weigh in on all aspects of this transformation. They range from analyzing the extent and direction of automation across a wide spectrum of business applications to assessing the value of “low-code” or “no-code” alternatives.
Most of the experts lined up here have long been passionate advocates of their specific specialties, and this makes them not only terrific explainers, but also invigoratingly direct writers. In “How To Turn Your Company Into a Master of Digital Transformation,” for instance, George Westerman of MIT’s Sloan School of Management clarifies the nature of the shift to automation: “You don’t become a Digital Master by just buying technology and plugging it in,” he writes. “There’s an awful lot of organizational change that has to happen first.” This point comes up repeatedly in these articles, with several writers pointing out not only the promise of greater automation, but also its dangers, such as overreliance on technological innovation or premature investment in the wrong strategies. And the fact that many innovative technologies aren’t developed by the people who use them can be problematic, as well, as technologist Chris Skinner points out: “Kids who can code are dramatically changing the financial markets, but they don’t understand the financial markets.” Hence the appeal of aforementioned “low-code” or “no-code” approaches, which put the tools of change in the hands of chief information officers themselves. Readers from the business world will find these chapters invaluable, particularly at present, with the seismic changes that Covid-19 has wrought in how businesses operate. But even readers who are unfamiliar with the nuances of automation will find these experts’ opinions to be compelling, with their sharp, insightful, real-time takes on one of the more dramatic societal shifts in the modern age.
An engaging book of expert business-survival advice for a troubled time.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73573-290-9
Page Count: 166
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2020
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
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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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