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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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