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
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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