An informative report from the streaming wars, though better suited for startup geeks than music nerds.
Two Swedish business reporters’ tale of the tenacious rise of the streaming-music giant that has fended off assaults from Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Taylor Swift.
When Spotify launched in Sweden in 2006, it had a brash agenda in a chaotic time for online music. Apple’s iTunes store had established a viable and legal marketplace for the post-Napster era, but Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek wanted to pursue a more open, stream-friendly, and cheaper alternative. The first chapters of the book, previously published in Sweden and translated and updated by the authors, detail the Spotify team’s dogged efforts to build their technology, though its greater challenge was convincing the music industry that a “freemium model” could work in its favor. In that regard, Ek had help from Sean Parker, who co-founded Napster and later introduced Ek to Mark Zuckerberg, a critical connection when Spotify began making inroads in the U.S. Headwinds were strong: Apple slow-walked approving Spotify to the app store, deals with major labels required sizable concessions from the company, and artists protested Spotify’s often skimpy payments to artists. (Swift withheld her 2014 album 1989 from Spotify for a time.) Carlsson and Leijonhufvud are seasoned business reporters who’ve garnered informative scoops about the company—e.g., a failed streaming-video venture, the terms of a deal with Sony Music, and abandoned efforts to buy Tidal or be bought by Google. Though the authors have a seemingly bottomless repository of song titles that serve as apt section headings, little elevates the narrative above sober, fairly dry business journalism. But it’s not all their fault: Ek isn’t an especially charismatic executive, and the authors characterize his leadership for the most part as blandly aloof. Ek is no Jobs, but he’s clearly held his own on the playing field Jobs created.
An informative report from the streaming wars, though better suited for startup geeks than music nerds.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63576-744-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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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