An optimistic, highly personal game plan for helping small businesses thrive.
A business strategy expert shares his ideas for helping small businesses excel.
Kaza opens his nonfiction debut with an account of his early efforts to help small businesses survive and flourish, describing how this commitment initially got him involved in the private equity lending group ForwardLine Financial, which was dedicated to getting small businesses successfully financed and prioritized a very personal, hands-on approach. All of this was going well, with both client businesses and ForwardLine thriving, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The author prioritized helping ForwardLine’s customers over its bottom line, and as a result, many small businesses came through the worst of it intact when they might otherwise have been forced to shut their doors permanently. Even so, almost 30 percent of ForwardLine’s customers had gone out of business as a result of the pandemic, and many of the survivors were struggling to survive. Told by friends that “Big businesses always win. Scale always wins,” Kaza found himself wondering, “Are small businesses really destined to fail when faced with bigger competitors?” Pondering this question led him to develop what he calls “Underdog Principles” built around “positioning, proximity, and purpose” and designed to help small businesses compete with their larger rivals by embracing their differences and using them to craft innovative marketing strategies. He focuses his chapters on the stories of small businesses and the entrepreneurs who build them, people who are often “not just CEOs, they’re also the janitors, receptionists, accountants, and HR managers all rolled into one.”
Running through all of Kaza’s advice and examples is a refreshingly sincere empathy, a genuine interest in the stories and needs of small businesses that one might not expect to find in money managers and loan officials. Whether it’s “a quality place to eat” or “I need my 5,000 psi hydrostatic drive to be rated for both high and sub-zero temperatures,” the author always tries to put himself in the shoes of the customers. “Don’t worry about matching your cost analysis exactly to the customer decision journey stages,” he advises his readers. “Focus instead on where you can track concrete numbers, such as how many clicks your ads get or how many trials convert to sales.” Most of this advice revolves around his “Underdog Principles,” which are winningly simple: positioning (having a well-defined customer base), purpose (sometimes focusing on a problem that needs solving rather than “conventional business metrics”), and, perhaps most important of all, proximity (knowing your customers well enough to understand what motivates their decisions). The homespun quality of Kaza’s business anecdotes helps to underscore the viability of these principles. For instance, the author tells of meeting body shop owner Mike because his own car needed work, and Mike’s Yelp reviews were superb because he’d taken to asking satisfied customers to leave reviews. “Sharing your personal story or business challenges with your customers can feel a little risky,” Kaza writes, but “The trust you build as a small business owner is your most valuable asset.” This consistently personal tone fills the book with a sense of optimism that will be much appreciated by entrepreneurs and small business owners at all stages of the game.
An optimistic, highly personal game plan for helping small businesses thrive.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781646872053
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2025
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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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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