A rousing and clear-eyed guide to setting one’s organization apart.
Consultant Heath offers a five-step plan for taking one’s business to a new level of success.
“Fighting for market share is grueling,” writes the author in her nonfiction debut. “Keeping up with the pace of early growth while protecting and improving margins is tougher than ever.” In order for readers to meet these challenges, she proposes a five-step framework for creating and fostering what she refers to as “Ownable Whitespace”—a place in a crowded market that’s only occupied by you and your product, creating a situation in which “you are not just your ideal customer’s number one choice—you are their only choice.” She asserts that this can be achieved through five steps: “Obsess,” “Differentiate,” “Commit,” “Execute,” and “Adapt.” She elaborates on each in a series of fast-paced chapters filled with anecdotes, bullet points, illustrations, discussion questions, and summaries designed to help her readers grasp key elements while keeping true to their organization’s “Business Ethos.” She specifically shows how one may use a “Brand Manifesto” to steer an organization’s communication strategy. Throughout these playbook sections, Heath effectively uses real-world corporate success stories, such as those of sportswear giant Nike, luxury clothing maker Hermès, or grocery chain Trader Joe’s. Although Heath can resort to bland phrases such as “you can play a different kind of game” or “Giddy Up,” her storytelling energy always makes for engaging reading. She brings a clarity to the importance of finding unique qualities; along the way, she rightly notes that too many organizations stumble into their own market identities, while the greatest success often comes to those who know precisely who they are. New companies, or those struggling to find their footing in a sea of competitors, will find plenty of valuable tips in these pages.
A rousing and clear-eyed guide to setting one’s organization apart.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798891383722
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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