A starting point for smart leaders who want to build smarter companies.
Technology consultant Richardson, in her debut, aims to create savvy business leaders by banishing guesswork and blind decision-making.
It takes more than talent, technical prowess and hard work to lead a successful business, writes Richardson. Executives must also have a comprehensive knowledge of the people, products and processes that affect profitability so that they can make better decisions. The author, a technology whiz who has worked as a corporate strategist for Fortune 500 companies, cleverly calls this knowledge “Executive IQ” —common-sensical, data-driven insight into a company’s customers, employees, products and sales. She argues that merely having a vague idea of which customers buy certain products, or how much is spent on marketing, is unacceptable. Shrewd executives, she asserts, probe deeper when making strategic decisions. By using cutting-edge software, they can answer such questions as “How long does it take from the initial inquiry to convert a sale?” or “How many promotions have been awarded internally in the last two to five years?” This may seem like analytical overkill, but Richardson contends that understanding such metrics can keep a business afloat during rocky times. The book urges readers to assess their current Executive IQ by taking a “balanced scorecard” quiz and provides three well-crafted chapters of advice on how to implement a customer relationship management program; executives can use a CRM and Executive IQ together to operate their firms more effectively, the author explains. Overall, this is a book for overachievers, penned in a witty, nimble style. Some assertions here will ruffle feathers; for example, Richardson believes that many executives and entrepreneurs make poor decisions due to ego, fear or ignorance. The author has founded two companies herself, and her words carry the authority of someone who’s fought in the trenches. A new approach will likely generate friction, Richardson notes, but she makes the case that change can pave the way for long-term success.
A starting point for smart leaders who want to build smarter companies.Pub Date: April 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988339415
Page Count: 204
Publisher: The RLC Group, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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