A solid guide for advisers that encourages a life that’s about more than financial returns.
A veteran of the world of finance offers insights for others in the profession.
In this debut business book, Danner offers his fellow financial advisers recommendations for building a successful career, achieving work-life balance, and developing a strategy for transitioning their clients to new advisers when they’re ready to retire. Danner, the founder of advisory firm Freedom Street Partners, describes his career progression from entry-level employee to business owner along with the philanthropic interests and personal goals he achieved at the same time. The book offers suggestions to others in the industry looking to build a profitable business with high income potential while also making time for family and other interests as well as giving back to their communities. The suggestions include both conceptual advice, such as developing self-awareness and evaluating life priorities, and concrete recommendations, such as developing and automating a process for staying in touch with clients as often as necessary. In the book’s final chapters, Danner discusses how those who have established their own businesses should plan for a retirement process that allows continuity for clients and financial stability for retiring advisers but also a sense of personal satisfaction and fulfillment. The book is aimed at a narrow audience of financial advisers and is thus able to make assumptions about background knowledge, socio-economic status, and career goals that would not be applicable to a wider readership, but in this context, it allows the text to be concise. Danner does an excellent job of encouraging his colleagues to focus on the personal elements of their profession—for instance, by understanding how often and in what context each client prefers to hear from their adviser—and to see themselves as members of a broader community. The author strengthens his recommendations by including stories about advisers he’s mentored, showing how others have successfully implemented his tips. His passion for his business and his charitable work is evident throughout, making him a credible voice for others in the same field.
A solid guide for advisers that encourages a life that’s about more than financial returns.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2216-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2022
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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