Less a guide to success in relationships, creativity, or even business than an astute analysis of problem-solving.
An appealing pop-science guide to creativity.
Books on problem-solving, including this one, tend to be directed toward aspiring businesspeople, but Economist senior editor Cukier and business school professors Mayer-Schönberger and de Vericourt offer a text that should have wider appeal. Unlike animals and computers, humans do not make decisions according to fixed rules. We operate with a mental model of a situation, a frame, that becomes critical when solving problems. Among the authors’ numerous illustrative anecdotes is the story of Nokia. For decades, handsets steadily became smaller, cheaper, and more convenient. That was the model, and Nokia led in sales. When Apple introduced the “bulkier, pricier, and buggier” iPhone in 2008, many companies did not realize that Apple had reframed the model, and Nokia barely escaped bankruptcy Although an accepted tenet in psychology for a century, framing entered the mainstream only when human intelligence bumped up against the limitation of computers. Computers calculate, solve complex problems, and even learn, but they remain helpless without human input: “AI is brilliant at answering what is asked; framers pose questions never before voiced. Computers work only in a world that exists; humans live in ones they imagine through framing.” This incredibly efficient means to reaching a decision requires three key elements: “causal thinking,” which predicts in advance what an action will produce; “counterfactuals,” which serve as “a form of dreaming—but wisely channeled, deliberately focused”; and “constraints,” which place limits on our imagination, allowing us to focus on actions that matter. The authors conclude with a long plea for pluralism, “friction,” and diversity in business, our personal lives, and society as a whole. “Uniformity is the end of successful framing,” they write. While tribalism and groupthink remain the default modes for many humans, the authors put forth solid theories supported by scientific researchers, educators, expert consultants, philosophers, and other thinkers.
Less a guide to success in relationships, creativity, or even business than an astute analysis of problem-solving.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18259-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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