With intellectual heft and plenty of actionable items, this is a smart prescription for better thinking.
A sometimes repetitive but generally useful manual on introducing cost-benefit analysis to decision-making.
“We need an effective intellectual framework for thinking about thinking—an approach to the world that acknowledges complexity and uncertainty but can nonetheless help us make the best possible decisions,” writes Rubin, a former Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs executive. There’s a lot packed into that suggestion, for acknowledging that complexity and uncertainty involves introducing risk analysis into decisions of import, which entails probabilistic thinking (What are the chances this is going to fail?), which involves the old economists’ trick of cost-benefit analysis, which circles back to risk. One does all this, Rubin counsels, by means of a yellow legal pad, a metaphor for any means of listing possible outcomes for reckoning honestly with key questions: “How do you make judgments about the probabilities? How do you consider trade-offs when priorities conflict? And how do you deal with potential scenarios that can’t be expressed in numerical terms?” Rubin is a qualitative thinker, but he admits that some qualitative assessment boils down simply to gut reactions. Though he belabors certain points, he makes subtle arguments about the dangers of, for instance, assuming that low risk means no risk and the desirability of leaders who care less about whether they’re popular than whether they make their best effort to get things right. In that regard, he branches out to leadership style, notably Bill Clinton’s, who was inclined to make decisions while taking a wide range of opinions that weren’t necessarily weighted toward the seniority of the person offering them. That approach relies on “embracing human complexity: recognizing and engaging with the inherent strengths, weaknesses, and motivations of individuals, and then working to give them the best chance to succeed.” And never skip the important step of asking “foundational questions.”
With intellectual heft and plenty of actionable items, this is a smart prescription for better thinking.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780593491393
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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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