For business readers, this insider’s tale informs and entertains.
A retired CEO weaves memoir, management philosophy, and career advice in this well-crafted debut.
MacDonald, a specialist in corporate real estate, draws the title from his capstone assignment—rescuing Australia’s largest property company, Investa, from collapse during the global financial crisis. His saga began in 2008, six months after Morgan Stanley took Investa private in an ill-timed, highly leveraged $6.5 billion buyout. He accepted a six-month stint in Australia that turned into five years of organizational scrambling and nick-of-time refinancing to avoid insolvency. He saved the company but lost his marriage. Alternating chapters backfill his biography, connecting decisions at Investa with lessons from his hardscrabble childhood, teenage factory jobs, college struggles, military service, and “globe-trotting” rise to the boardroom. MacDonald turns the same eye for detail that scrutinized balance sheets to rendering scenes. The volume of tangential, personal details could have shrunk his potential readership to his grandchildren, but he is an adept storyteller with a colorful past. Poignant, well-told recollections keep the reader engaged. MacDonald’s writing, like the management style he chronicles, is deliberate and nuanced, not flashy. Understatement and pacing magnify inherent tensions, as in a passage describing three executives awaiting a bank decision on renewing a $650 million loan: “The loan would mature the next day. I asked Jonathan at exactly what time; after checking the documents, he told me 11 a.m. No one had ever asked him before at precisely what time of day a loan matured.” MacDonald draws his characters concisely. A chief financial officer is “a quiet guy, the type who knew all the answers but was reticent to disclose any.” An Australian banker speaks in “an earthy vernacular, reflecting his early days as a union organizer and Labor Party activist.” In closing, he summarizes 25 key lessons, emphasizing teamwork, ethics, win-win solutions, decentralized decision-making, open communications, and respecting workers. None are entirely original, but his life experiences elevate platitudes to practical guidance. MacDonald puts a compassionate face on the CEO stereotype and reveals real people, not caricatures, caught in the executive-suite dramas spawned by the financial crisis.
For business readers, this insider’s tale informs and entertains.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68102-080-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Next Century Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Gorman, creating customers is an act of cultivating delight–-a motto that most businesses would do well to follow.
Gorman, who runs a boutique creative-brand agency, offers a refreshing return to business basics, when competition was a novel concept and businesses actually put the customer first.
Not that Gorman is trotting out old business saws in a fuddy-duddy way; his style is energetic, and his delivery is keen and clean. He is not about to forsake branding, but he will tell you to forget the fancy dancing, the retro music and the airy cleverness. His emphasis is on delivering satisfaction to the customers—consistently–-with the ultimate goal of making them friends for the long term. Granted, it's not a revolutionary concept, but in the Age of Hype, it's certainly salubrious. Profits cannot be a guiding principle; business owners must understand the values, tastes and preferences of their audience, and then create a brand that becomes "the story that people will tell when asked to recommend your product or service to someone else"–-and one that exceeds expectations. In other words, create an identity and be all you say you are. Tag lines, logos, websites–-these are all brand articulations, and though Gorman acknowledges their importance, they are not value articulations and they can't carry the product if the consumer's experience isn't pleasurable and enthusiastic. Gorman even goes a step further: The product must be a delight. (He includes many amusing anecdotes, but the best involves him tipping a saxophone-playing spaceman in the subway.) Gorman also offers intelligent advice about making oneself attractive to prospects, about clarity of message, about elegance and about the importance of word-of-mouth for verifying quality (with a nod to George Silverman)–-though it would have been helpful to get a few examples of controlling and sequencing word-of-mouth marketing.
For Gorman, creating customers is an act of cultivating delight–-a motto that most businesses would do well to follow.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-9749169-0-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An accessible audit of Russia's efforts to gain a place at global capitalism's table after more than seven decades of Communist misrule and mismanagement. As Goldman (Economics/Wellesley; What Went Wrong with Perestroika, 1991, etc.) makes abundantly clear, switching from a centrally planned economy to a market economy is easier said than done. Goldman draws on in-country contacts, official records, and contemporary news reports to document how Moscow has gone wrong at critical junctures since 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev first set the Soviet Union on a restructuring course whose implications he did not fully grasp. After a lucid account of the sociopolitical events that allowed Boris Yeltsin to oust Gorbachev (in effect, by undermining the USSR), the author offers an unsparing critique of the current incumbent's stewardship. Like his unfortunate predecessor, Goldman points out, Yeltsin failed to facilitate the formation of new businesses. Nor did he and his chief adviser (Yegor Gaidar) do enough to encourage land ownership. They also neglected to institute currency reforms that could have dampened inflationary pressures and enhanced the ruble's convertibility. Banking, price control, and tax policies were botched as well; the regime has dithered disastrously on privatizing state-owned enterprises; and the government has yet to sponsor commercial codes that might restore much-needed order to a chaotic, crime-ridden consumer marketplace. The author goes on to weigh Russia's makeover prospects in the context of the bootstrap recoveries achieved by former Kremlin satellites (Hungary, Poland), mainland China, and WW II's losers (Japan, West Germany). Even without much foreign aid or investment in the short run, concludes Goldman, the Russians could eventually win their latest revolution, albeit at no small cost. An informed and informative analysis of the toil and trouble attendant upon a great nation's attempts to gain world-class status as an economic rather than military power. Helpful tabular material and graphs throughout.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03700-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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