A handbook of solid advice with some limitations.
A former IBM executive draws lessons from his career path and meditates on his legacy.
Adkins, currently the president of the 3RAM Group, presents a memoir and leadership manual that tracks a familiar, earnest arc: a gifted kid from an under-resourced neighborhood later becomes a senior executive and an influential board member by asking better questions than everyone else. This book is organized chronologically, with chapters tracing the author’s life and career—“The Kid,” “The Student,” and “The Professional”—before shifting into more prescriptive territory in “The Recipe,” “The Steps,” and “The Exit.” Adkins frames his life as both a case study and a blueprint. His curiosity manifested early on—he enjoyed dismantling and reassembling appliances—and he credits teachers, parents, and various community figures with channeling his intellect toward engineering. Georgia Tech sharpened his focus, he says, and fraternity life reinforced loyalties and networks. His years at IBM form the book’s backbone; Adkins recounts his rise through technical and managerial ranks. He also emphasizes moments in which asking “Why?,” “How?,” or “What if?” led to turnarounds. In the second half, the book moves from ambition to stewardship; board service, mentoring, and philanthropy dominate these chapters, culminating in a meditation on legacy. Adkins stresses that success should “be shared because it came from the benefit of acquired knowledge, help, and support you received from others along the way.” Curiosity is less a tactical tool than a moral posture, as he frames it. As a guide to succeeding in business, the book is steady, if familiar. Its advice to stay curious, work hard, be prepared, build relationships, take the high road, and invest in other people is sound and clearly earned. Other aspects of business, however, such as digital disruption, platform economics, and the precarity of modern careers, receive little sustained attention. For readers seeking reassurance, a framework for professional ethics, and a story of honorable success, it delivers. For those looking for a playbook for the future, it reads more like a valedictory address than a field manual.
A handbook of solid advice with some limitations.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9798887508245
Page Count: 280
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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