A thoughtful recollection of an admirably accomplished career.
Bening chronicles his considerable success in this business memoir.
Armed with a degree in chemistry from St. Lawrence University, the author began working for MonoSol, a chemical product manufacturer, in 1989, in marketing and sales. By 2001, he was the company’s CEO and part-owner, and he stewarded it from $4 million in annual sales to a projected half billion by 2021. Over the course of his 33 years at the helm, Bening experienced the highs and lows of the entrepreneurial life and formulated a coherent and impressively undogmatic business philosophy. Many of the lessons the author imparts are nearly obligatory staples of the business-book field—he encourages the reader to build “trust-based relationships,” to push innovation, establish a healthy business culture, and resist the encroachments of excessive bureaucratic complexity. Moreover, he is not immune to the allure of the genre’s hoariest cliches: “Don’t get stuck in your comfort zone, focused only on the familiar.” Nevertheless, Bening departs from the hackneyed by exercising quite a bit of admirable circumspection—one of the reasons he gives for taking relationships seriously is that “However brilliant we are, we all operate from a limited perspective.” Also, he goes beyond the mindless cheerleading of perpetual disruption by acknowledging the profound unpredictability of innovation, and the need to cautiously subject it to “professionalizing.” Most of the book is devoted to a granular history of MonoSol and its remarkable ascendancy rather than the espousal of platitudes. The section on a “strong network of IP measures” is particularly edifying, uncommon for a book of this kind, and relevant to the technology industry. Overall, this amalgam of memoir and business handbook avoids many of the chief vices of similar titles, and should be a valuable resource, especially for entrepreneurs working in technology.
A thoughtful recollection of an admirably accomplished career.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781544538631
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Roni Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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