Brilliantly executed; a definitive work on business transformation.
A business book explores future-oriented strategies.
Rakesh, CEO of an Indian IT services firm, and Wind, Lauder professor emeritus and professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, have teamed up to craft an essential, timely work focused on business transformation. Using the Covid-19 pandemic as a springboard, the authors suggest that the virus disaster spawns opportunities, while lessons can be learned for responding to future crises. Positing eight principles “to defend against disruptors or become one,” the authors offer a framework for implementing the tenets and 10 specific tools to facilitate execution. This already comprehensive package will be further enhanced by the subsequent addition of an online dashboard and app. Rakesh and Wind are insistent that becoming adept at transformation means embracing all of the principles, which can be customized regardless of an organization’s size or business type. They begin with an intriguing discussion of the core theme of disruption in business, consumer behavior, and society, pointing out that unruly influences already existed but were exacerbated by the pandemic. They highlight examples of disruption in several industry segments with text and illustrative charts, demonstrating how successful companies have constantly reinvented themselves.
The primary content of the visionary book is divided into eight chapters, one for each of the principles. The chapters explain in detail the associated principles. Embedded in every chapter are many highly engaging and relevant stories of innovative companies from around the globe that are fruitfully applying the tenets. The tales are vividly told and seamlessly integrated with the authors’ salient observations. At the end of each chapter is a series of strategic questions to help “assess how aligned you and your organization are with the principle and the ideas and examples discussed.” This approach exposes readers to numerous exceptional examples that not only perfectly illustrate the principles, but could spark innovation in any organization as well. For example, the second principle involves reinventing an approach to consumers and stakeholders through “customer-centric digital transformation.” Here, Rakesh and Wind ponder the particularly daunting challenge for legacy companies to replace their core systems with new, digital ones, a virtually impossible task. The authors arrive at an ingenious alternate solution— “create an intermediary layer that connects the front-end with the back-end. This can be done faster and cheaper than replacing the entire core systems.” The authors demonstrate in technical but comprehensible detail exactly how such a task can be accomplished. Similarly, the sixth principle, which discusses the need for “adaptive experimentation,” identifies the specific benefits of this practice while citing numerous state-of-the-art examples. Useful cases, illustrative charts and graphics, a consultative text, and thoughtful questions combine to make every principle-related chapter pertinent and actionable. The book closes with an extremely valuable section that includes a 10-step implementation model for applying the eight principles as well as 10 tools (worksheets) to assist in establishing the tenets. The tools themselves are carefully constructed and scrupulously described.
Brilliantly executed; a definitive work on business transformation.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63-714755-9
Page Count: 554
Publisher: Notion Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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