A wide-ranging, helpful guide to formulating effective decisions.
A manual focuses on making well-reasoned decisions in business and personal contexts.
In this guide, Ugarte offers readers a framework for making decisions that can be applied to personal choices as well as professional ones, although the book concentrates primarily on the business aspects of the process. The manual urges readers to maintain perspective, delegate appropriately, use relevant data, and develop a rubric for brainstorming and assessing options. The author encourages readers to automate the process where possible (a tactic he calls “the turtleneck principle,” citing Steve Jobs’ daily wearing of the shirts) and to use a framework of outcomes, options, and obstacles (“the 3 Os”) to structure and steer more complicated and high-stakes decisions. The book also explores decision-making from a leadership perspective, with an emphasis on the importance of avoiding micromanagement and allowing subordinates to take ownership of their own assessments. The volume’s final chapter addresses the use of data in decision-making, supplying solutions for feeling overwhelmed by too much information and guidance on when intuition is more important than numbers. The generally solid manual provides actionable insights and workable strategies, although it would have benefited from stronger editing. Ugarte displays a tendency to return to favorite examples repeatedly; for instance, the Chilean economy and the work of author Alan Weiss make multiple appearances in the text. The “behind the decision” case studies that appear throughout the volume often detract from the primary argument by presenting insufficient details and analysis or by engaging superficially with historical events. Ugarte is on much firmer ground discussing the decisions made by technology executives, skillfully using those choices to illustrate the book’s “3 Os.” That framework and other strategies presented in these pages are concrete enough to follow and flexible enough to fit a variety of circumstances, making the manual applicable to a broad audience. By encouraging readers to understand not only what decisions need to be made, but also the sociocultural forces that shape them and why the potential outcomes matter, the work delivers a grounded perspective.
A wide-ranging, helpful guide to formulating effective decisions.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-202825-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Productivity Pr
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
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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