A powerfully written dissection of thought leadership for the business world.
A business book offers a comprehensive, itemized look at the nature and practice of effective leadership.
Buday makes clear at the outset of his work that he’s well aware of the devaluation the term thought leadershiphas undergone in the last two decades. What he refers to as “the supply side of thought leadership”—“inventing revolutionary concepts that improve how businesses operate, marketing those concepts well, and attracting adulation and new business”—has been “slapped on blog posts, white papers, research reports, sections of websites and many other things that turn out to be (upon inspection) not highly thoughtful.” The author aims his own breakdown of these concepts at the business-to-business market and the executives and consultants in this sector, seeking to explain the nuts and bolts of such buzzwords as “customer loyalty management, disruptive innovation, blue ocean strategy, lean startup, and emotion intelligence, to name just a few.” He hopes to differentiate the key concepts from the “useless debris calling itself thought leadership” that’s now floating around in “the vast cosmos of business ideas.” He goes about this in ways that will be familiar to readers of business literature: categories and sub-categories, from “the 4 pillars of thought leadership” to “the nine hallmarks of compelling content.” He expands on a wide variety of business-related topics, from the perils of stressing marketing over content (“a marketing-centric view of thought leadership is guaranteed to confine a company to thought followership status, not thought leadership”) to the burgeoning prevalence of the whole thought leadership fad, fueled by things like TED Talks and national conferences.
Buday’s rhetoric about all of this is forceful and very readable. While trying to explain the explosion of thought leadership, he blames the escalating complexity of the business world. “Executives need to figure out their companies’ strategic direction,” he writes, “how to create demand and supply for their products and services, how to stage productive innovation, and how to attract and keep talented people.” Although it’s perhaps surprising how many of the author’s points revolve around not boardroom tactics but the generation of prose (“Writing, and writing, and writing some more,” as he puts it), what’s sometimes less than clear about his book is what, if anything, separates it from the ocean of “useless debris” he mentions at the beginning of his work. His volume, granted, is aimed at the kind of C-suite readers who a) think there even is such a thing as thought leadership (as opposed to simple, good business practices, which have been recognized in every consumer culture since ancient Sumer) and b) believe it’s intensely important to the running of their companies. Such readers will doubtless appreciate the difference between “business reengineering” and “massive layoffs,” for instance, and for that audience, Buday’s book should provide a bracingly no-nonsense series of clarifications about where B2B priorities should fall. If the author is right and the corporate world is more intricate than ever, this work should deliver some clear navigation.
A powerfully written dissection of thought leadership for the business world.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64687-100-1
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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