A fast-paced and engaging account of taking a business from weakness to strength.
A turnaround expert advises business leaders on moving to profitability.
In this business book, Canady draws on his experience as a CEO often hired to rehabilitate companies in financial and operational trouble to discuss how to establish the conditions that allow businesses to thrive. The Pareto principle underlies the author’s approach—Canady explains to readers how to shift a company’s focus to the 20% of products and customers that deliver the majority of the business’ revenue, resulting in more profitable operations. The author contends that businesses need to earn “the right to grow,” which they can do by setting a goal and making an action plan. The book provides a detailed example of such a process, using a pseudonymous company Canady once ran on behalf of its private equity owners. The author takes readers through the process of segmenting both products and customers into the profitable 20% and the unprofitable 80%, offering suggestions on how to maximize the value of the unprofitable majority. Canady advises readers on how to get staff aligned with corporate goals, how to measure progress and profitability, and how to approach an existing business with a fresh mindset in order to make the changes needed for its survival. Sometimes, the author’s analogies are overstretched (like his claim that Thoreau set a goal of “achieving a trivial-to-critical ratio of 95/5” when he moved into a cabin by Walden Pond), but readers will generally find enough substance in the text to allow them to overlook some rhetorical excesses and unnecessary repetition (the concept of “zeroing-up” is defined at length twice). On the whole, the book is highly readable, offers actionable advice, and gives readers a solid understanding of what it takes to make a business profitable. Canady’s enthusiasm for the turnaround process drives the narrative pace, making the book a quick read with meaty sections readers will return to when they are ready to apply its lessons to their own workplaces.
A fast-paced and engaging account of taking a business from weakness to strength.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781394331581
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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