A well-considered business primer with feeling.
An entrepreneur shares his guiding principles in this debut.
The CEO of a facilities management firm, Kurland adopted the mantra “Be Better” when he launched his company in 2014. He embedded that notion into the corporate culture, distilling it into 13 principles that he discusses chapter by chapter. His goal, writes Kurland, is to help the reader “lead with emotional intelligence.” The principles themselves are far from unique; for example, “Be Fearless,” “Be Purposeful,” and “Be Inspiring” aren’t exactly breakthrough exhortations. As Kurland admits in the introduction, the content “may seem like common sense,” and the result is a book that is clearly geared to those who are thinking about or just starting a business. Still, Kurland puts a positive spin on each principle, writing with an enthusiasm that is infectious. His candid advice, based on his own experience, is steeped in practical wisdom. “Following up is both an often-forgotten activity and the primary reason why business deals fall through,” he counsels in the first chapter. “Understanding which of your tasks need to be delegated is the initial step in figuring out who you should hire first,” he advises in a principle he terms “Be People-Centric.” Regarding purpose, Kurland proclaims, “The single most important thing you can do as a business owner and CEO is to define the core values of your company.” While some readers may regard these as platitudes, such statements have intrinsic value for budding entrepreneurs who doubtlessly need the most basic form of guidance. Kurland’s writing style is personal and direct; the brief chapters and clearly marked subsections facilitate scanning; and the plentiful tips throughout the book lend themselves to highlighting and notations. Ever the marketer, Kurland cleverly wraps up each chapter/principle by referencing a specific relevant episode of his podcast series. Kurland’s aim to build a cadre of caring business owners may be best expressed by these thoughts in the final chapter: “Be authentic. Be vulnerable. Be gentle when you’re delivering hard messages. Be kind.”
A well-considered business primer with feeling.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2972-1
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
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