An enthusiastic resource for business leaders who recognize that they’re falling behind.
In Stemple’s guidebook, he explains why big corporations fail to innovate and what can be done about it.
In corporate culture, innovation is a poorly defined buzzword—something that most organizations tout but rarely support with adequate resources. Instead, startups have become known as the place where true innovation happens in the face of ever changing trends. Stemple, a veteran of more than 20 startups, illustrates how an overreliance on risk-averse, operations-minded people with MBAs has allowed ambitious entrepreneurs to innovate better than established organizations, drawing on the sometimes-chaotic ingenuity of talent that might be missed elsewhere. The author presents 20 innovator traits (including fierceness, ambitiousness, diligence, and so on), divided into five types, and executives can use them to identify prospective employees and understand how to protect, reward, and develop innovation. The book also breaks down the entrepreneurial thought process so that companies can emulate a forward-thinking startup mindset that treats innovation as an emergency and competition as all-consuming. This includes instructions on how to develop “S.W.A.T. Innovation teams” for combating unconventional challenges and new competitors as well as an overview of the benefits that a dedicated “Entrepreneur in Residence” can add to a company. Overall, the guidebook offers practical advice in a passionate manner, with quality citations and plenty of graphs, tables, and visual guides. There is some familiar business jargon, but the book clearly and consistently limns the differences between innovators and operators and plainly states its pro-invention methods. Some aspects of introducing such a mindset into an existing organization are vaguely described; networking seems particularly important, but it’s mentioned only briefly, and there are few tips for abating the friction one may face when emphasizing innovation. Impressively, however, the author shares how he specifically develops and pitches ideas, and he includes a particularly heartwarming story about how his custom-made stickers helped a bullied child. It feels like a missed opportunity that the book doesn’t include more of these affecting moments as well as more of the “failed choices” innovators make.
An enthusiastic resource for business leaders who recognize that they’re falling behind.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2022
ISBN: 9780999602539
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Inspirer Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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