An effective action plan for companies dealing with geopolitical instability.
McCaffrey, Henisz, and Jones offer a strategy for businesses grappling with an uncertain geopolitical future.
In their collaborative nonfiction debut, the authors (a business consultant, a professor of management, and an analyst) propose approaches to geopolitical risk in the modern era that are intended to remain “evergreen” by “embedding geopolitical analysis into a company’s DNA.” This “geostrategy” (“the holistic and cross-functional integration of political risk management into broader risk management, strategy, and governance,” per the book’s introduction) takes the form of four activities that are all woven together by a fifth: First, companies must first scan the political landscape of the moment, seeking to identify short- and long-term political risks (and opportunities) that result from all kinds of instability. They must then focus, assessing the potential dangers those risks pose. Next, they must manage and strategize, incorporating the variables represented by those risks into actual company policies. Finally, they must reckon with the results, establishing “a cross-functional geostrategic team” to implement their new strategies. In short chapters supplemented by illustrations and buttressed by research, McCaffrey, Henisz, and Jones clarify the key role corporate chief strategy officers and other executives should play in devising plans for such things as “disposing of noncore assets,” “raising and optimizing capital to fund growth,” and “analyzing capital allocation.” The authors convey all of this in direct and forceful prose that is unfortunately often bogged down in turgid business-speak (“the analysis helped to inform a strategy designed to minimize downside risks and capture opportunities associated with these political changes”). Their subject could hardly be timelier; as they point out, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic’s disruption of global supply chains, the international business world has never been keener to work geopolitics into their strategies. The CSOs of such businesses will find a great deal of insightful and highly detailed thinking on that subject here.
An effective action plan for companies dealing with geopolitical instability.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781633310735
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2024
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
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
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