A meandering yet mostly engaging prescription for getting ahead in business and life.
Don’t quit your day job just yet, but do prepare to “harness the future and the past” to change the world and make yourself a superstar.
Friedman opens with a well-known moment in the history of technology: when Steve Jobs called out Bill Gates for supposedly stealing Apple’s software to build Windows. “I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox,” Gates coolly replied, “and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found that you had already stolen it.” True enough, but even as Xerox snoozed, both Jobs and Gates had reverse-engineered their inventions from the Xerox original, “systematically taking things apart to explore their inner workings and extract new insights.” Though Friedman’s definition of reverse-engineering gets more metaphorical as the narrative proceeds, his fundamental lesson holds: If you want to be a novelist, you pick apart the work of eminent models to figure out their tricks; if you want to be a musician, you try to learn to think like Paul McCartney. Whatever the pursuit, writes the author, the race is on, since if you’re alive and working, you’re “facing significantly more competition than your colleagues did a decade back.” Greatness, Friedman holds, hinges on the mind, both creative and detail-oriented, that can see what someone else has done and do it better—or do something that the other thing does not. Drawing on examples from Jeff Bezos to Judd Apatow, Malcolm Gladwell, and Vincent Van Gogh (women, regrettably, don’t often figure in Friedman’s pages), the author examines how these creative minds think and counsels readers to ask interesting questions, solicit and interpret feedback (but not too much, since “feedback is valuable, but only to a point”), develop meaningful metrics, and set goals.
A meandering yet mostly engaging prescription for getting ahead in business and life.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982135-79-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A marvelously tender memoir on suicide and loss.
An essayist and novelist turns her attention to the heartache of a friend’s suicide.
Crosley’s memoir is not only a joy to read, but also a respectful and philosophical work about a colleague’s recent suicide. “All burglaries are alike, but every burglary is uninsured in its own way,” she begins, in reference to the thief who stole the jewelry from her New York apartment in 2019. Among the stolen items was her grandmother’s “green dome cocktail ring with tiers of tourmaline (think kryptonite, think dish soap).” She wrote those words two months after the burglary and “one month since the violent death of my dearest friend.” That friend was Russell Perreault, referred to only by his first name, her boss when she was a publicist at Vintage Books. Russell, who loved “cheap trinkets” from flea markets, had “the timeless charm of a movie star, the competitive edge of a Spartan,” and—one of many marvelous details—a “thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, seemingly scalped from the roof of an English country house.” Over the years, the two became more than boss and subordinate, teasing one another at work, sharing dinners, enjoying “idyllic scenes” at his Connecticut country home, “a modest farmhouse with peeling paint and fragile plumbing…the house that Windex forgot.” It was in the barn at that house that Russell took his own life. Despite the obvious difference in the severity of robbery and suicide, Crosley fashions a sharp narrative that finds commonality in the dislocation brought on by these events. The book is no hagiography—she notes harassment complaints against Russell for thoughtlessly tossed-off comments, plus critiques of the “deeply antiquated and often backward” publishing industry—but the result is a warm remembrance sure to resonate with anyone who has experienced loss.
A marvelously tender memoir on suicide and loss.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780374609849
Page Count: 208
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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