An intriguing—yet not universally applicable—look at what recording artists can teach us about innovation.
Connecting the dots between music and entrepreneurial inspiration.
How can music teach us—or at least teach musicians—about business innovation? That’s the question posed by Panay, the senior vice president for global strategy and innovation at Berklee College of Music, and Hendrix, global design director of design and innovation at the IDEO consultancy group. The authors chronicle their discussions with artists and entrepreneurs about qualities that both groups share. Among the subjects are some heavy hitters. Justin Timberlake lays down his guiding principle on experimentation: “I have only one rule in the studio, and it’s this: dare to suck. You may have a great idea in your head as somebody’s playing a riff on the guitar. Don’t hold it in.” Interscope head Jimmy Iovine weighs in on the act of listening, which isn’t as simple as you might think, by way of Beats headphones and a famous ad featuring the NBA’s Kevin Garnett walking into a rival arena and drowning out the hostility with his Beats. Wilco bassist John Stirratt discusses Tourists, a Massachusetts hotel “created to bring strangers together around shared experiences.” Stirratt makes the musical connection tangible as he shouts out the Austin hotel that gave him the idea: “I have the same feeling checking into the San Jose as I do listening to a Miles Davis record for the fiftieth time….It’s a visceral experience, a feeling of possibility.” The book is strongest in the authors’ presentations of heady concepts in down-to-earth fashion. But what if you’re not a musician, and what if your brain doesn’t yield the same starbursts of creativity as the likes of Pharrell, Björk, and Imogen Heap? Some of these lessons may still apply to you, but others may be out of reach. Other luminaries in the text include Dr. Dre, Steve Vai, and T Bone Burnett, and a series of “Interludes” offer soundtracks to illuminate the lessons.
An intriguing—yet not universally applicable—look at what recording artists can teach us about innovation.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3058-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
