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
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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