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
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
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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