A guide to entrepreneurial success from the founder of the Rainforest Café.
In short, snappy chapters, Schussler, CEO of Schussler Creative, Inc., offers advice culled from his career developing some of the country’s leading theme-based restaurants. Readers of motivational books have heard much of it before: Be a risk-taker. Be creative. Pay attention to detail. Thank people. Be passionate. “I’m talking about PASSION,” he writes. Keep trying, and “never give up—no matter what!” However familiar, the homilies are grounded in real life, as demonstrated by his many instructive and entertaining stories. A go-getter from an early age—he held more than a dozen jobs before turning 16—Schussler was in his 20s, selling TV advertising in Chicago, when he decided to go to work for himself. He began restoring old juke boxes, opened a store selling nostalgia items, went bankrupt and then used his unsold inventory to create a successful 1950s retro dance club. That’s when he realized that with a good idea, anything was possible. To attract investors to his plans for a themed restaurant based on the tropical rainforest, he turned his suburban home into a misty jungle that included 40 tropical birds, two tortoises, a baboon, countless fish, waterfalls, rock outcroppings, rivers and a full-sized replica of an elephant. After urging the author to seek psychiatric help, a visiting venture capitalist toured the house, returned with his kids and eventually provided start-up money for the Rainforest Café chain. Another time, Schussler was in the Dakota Badlands, realized dinosaurs had roamed there and came up with the idea for his T-Rex family adventure restaurants. The author writes that he learned the importance of publicity when, as a young man, he donned a Superman costume, got into a wooden barrel and had two policeman friends deliver him to an interview for a sales job. “Son, you are the sickest person we’ve ever met,” he was told. “You’re hired.”
A bright pep talk for aspiring entrepreneurs.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4027-6289-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Union Square/Sterling
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
Categories: GENERAL BUSINESS | BUSINESS | ENTREPRENUERSHP
Did you like this book?
Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to...
GET IT
A French academic serves up a long, rigorous critique, dense with historical data, of American-style predatory capitalism—and offers remedies that Karl Marx might applaud.
Economist Piketty considers capital, in the monetary sense, from the vantage of what he considers the capital of the world, namely Paris; at times, his discussions of how capital works, and especially public capital, befit Locke-ian France and not Hobbesian America, a source of some controversy in the wide discussion surrounding his book. At heart, though, his argument turns on well-founded economic principles, notably r > g, meaning that the “rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy,” in Piketty’s gloss. It logically follows that when such conditions prevail, then wealth will accumulate in a few hands faster than it can be broadly distributed. By the author’s reckoning, the United States is one of the leading nations in the “high inequality” camp, though it was not always so. In the colonial era, Piketty likens the inequality quotient in New England to be about that of Scandinavia today, with few abject poor and few mega-rich. The difference is that the rich now—who are mostly the “supermanagers” of business rather than the “superstars” of sports and entertainment—have surrounded themselves with political shields that keep them safe from the specter of paying more in taxes and adding to the fund of public wealth. The author’s data is unassailable. His policy recommendations are considerably more controversial, including his call for a global tax on wealth. From start to finish, the discussion is written in plainspoken prose that, though punctuated by formulas, also draws on a wide range of cultural references.
Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high—and is only bound to grow worse.Pub Date: March 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-43000-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BUSINESS | BUSINESS | MODERN | ECONOMICS | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Noted number cruncher Sperling delivers an economist’s rejoinder to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Former director of the National Economic Council in the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the author has long taken a view of the dismal science that takes economic justice fully into account. Alongside all the metrics and estimates and reckonings of GDP, inflation, and the supply curve, he holds the great goal of economic policy to be the advancement of human dignity, a concept intangible enough to chase the econometricians away. Growth, the sacred mantra of most economic policy, “should never be considered an appropriate ultimate end goal” for it, he counsels. Though 4% is the magic number for annual growth to be considered healthy, it is healthy only if everyone is getting the benefits and not just the ultrawealthy who are making away with the spoils today. Defining dignity, admits Sperling, can be a kind of “I know it when I see it” problem, but it does not exist where people are a paycheck away from homelessness; the fact, however, that people widely share a view of indignity suggests the “intuitive universality” of its opposite. That said, the author identifies three qualifications, one of them the “ability to meaningfully participate in the economy with respect, not domination and humiliation.” Though these latter terms are also essentially unquantifiable, Sperling holds that this respect—lack of abuse, in another phrasing—can be obtained through a tight labor market and monetary and fiscal policy that pushes for full employment. In other words, where management needs to come looking for workers, workers are likely to be better treated than when the opposite holds. In still other words, writes the author, dignity is in part a function of “ ‘take this job and shove it’ power,” which is a power worth fighting for.
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7987-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
