A thoughtful and enthusiastic high-concept assessment of how top companies succeed.
A look at how examples from politics can transform brand marketing.
In this debut business book, Bernard argues that the most successful companies, haven’t found success through traditional branding practices, but by treating their businesses like political campaigns. Companies such as Amazon, Tesla, and Uber—the “Transcenders” of the book’s subtitle—set own their agendas, according to this book’s framing, instead of responding only to competitors’ actions. They distill their core messages into concise, memorable slogans that help to turn customers into true believers. Bernard opens by analyzing several political campaigns, including those of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, to highlight elements of his framework, such as those mentioned above; in subsequent chapters, he uses these concepts to analyze the actions of booming companies. For example, he looks at how Starbucks presents itself as a “third place” that isn’t one’s home or work, and how skincare company Glossier went from covering makeup trends to setting them. The final chapter offers a few recommendations for readers looking to apply similar models to their own businesses. Bernard’s prose style, with its distracting abundance of capitalized terms (“As a Transcender leader, [Apple co-founder Steve] Jobs recognized that he needed two things: a winning Campaign Agenda and winning product candidates”) that may not appeal to all readers. However, like the companies he profiles, he knows how to make a convincing case, and he does a good job of presenting and supporting his arguments. The book is at its strongest when it highlights key elements of successful campaigns, as when Bernard recommends replacing the classic “elevator pitch” with something briefer that one can present when elevator doors are closing: “if you can only communicate four words to your customer on an elevator, it should be the Campaign Agenda, since it is far more important to Communicate the Agendathan it is to promote the brand.” The chapter offering tips to readers on applying the framework to their own businesses, however, is mostly quite general, focusing more on concepts than actionable steps.
A thoughtful and enthusiastic high-concept assessment of how top companies succeed.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2232-6
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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