Of considerable interest to the entrepreneurially minded, with caveats.
You, too, can be ultrawealthy—if you can take your startup from zero to a billion in 60 seconds flat.
Building on a popular course at Stanford, tech-investment guru Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn, and entrepreneur Yeh (co-authors: The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, 2014) note that it’s not enough to have a good idea or be first to market; a business must scale to attain maximum global market share in the just-in-time, flash-fast atmosphere of the internet. Airbnb is a great idea, for example, but what makes it really work is the ubiquity of the enterprise, so that “each additional Airbnb host makes the service a tiny bit more valuable for every Airbnb guest and vice versa.” Attaining success at “blitzscaling”—a somewhat unfortunate term, the authors allow, given the connotations of “blitzkrieg”—can involve forgetting everything that one learned at business school, to say nothing of received wisdom, but it’s what got Amazon its market dominance. Bleeding money until one attains scale invokes one of the authors’ key observations, namely that while it has some astonishing possibilities and massive payoffs, it “also comes with massive risks.” Though the authors make a few nods to playing nice in the marketplace, this is a book of which Gordon Gekko would doubtless approve. The blitzscale success of Uber may have come with unfortunate moral deficits, but the company does have “a dominant market position in the cities in which it operates,” and investors will be happy when autonomous vehicles are similarly blitzscaled so that the business of paying those pesky drivers can be dispensed with. This is zero-sum, law-of-the-jungle stuff, and readers with a low tolerance for the attendant obnoxiousness—as when the authors write approvingly of the strategy of ignoring customers at PayPal, temporary expedient or no—will want to consult Muhammad Yunus instead. Devotees of Silicon Valley, on the other hand, will eat it up.
Of considerable interest to the entrepreneurially minded, with caveats.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6141-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Currency
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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