An engaging book of expert business-survival advice for a troubled time.
A debut collection of essays about automation in the business world.
“If we concede reason to instinct, we forfeit the greatest survival mechanism of all, the ability to adapt,” writes chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in his foreword to this densely packed anthology. “This isn't a chess insight, or business strategy; it’s basic Darwinism.” The invocation of survival is apt, as today’s troubled economy hangs over the contents of Calkins’ book, which asserts the need for businesses to adapt quickly in the face of abruptly changing customer needs. Long before the Covid-19 pandemic, complicated software was becoming, as the author puts it, the spinal cord of business, and it’s become even more vital now, he says. “Companies today need to be ready at all times to write an application on which their business might depend,” he writes. “The new mandate is for agility in all applications, especially the most important ones.” Calkins, the CEO of enterprise technology company Appian, clarifies that the automation to which he’s referring is not the old conception of the replacement of humans with machines but rather the increasing combination of humans, artificial intelligence, and robotics in the workplace. In these pages, he assembles a collection of essays by CEOs and experts that weigh in on all aspects of this transformation. They range from analyzing the extent and direction of automation across a wide spectrum of business applications to assessing the value of “low-code” or “no-code” alternatives.
Most of the experts lined up here have long been passionate advocates of their specific specialties, and this makes them not only terrific explainers, but also invigoratingly direct writers. In “How To Turn Your Company Into a Master of Digital Transformation,” for instance, George Westerman of MIT’s Sloan School of Management clarifies the nature of the shift to automation: “You don’t become a Digital Master by just buying technology and plugging it in,” he writes. “There’s an awful lot of organizational change that has to happen first.” This point comes up repeatedly in these articles, with several writers pointing out not only the promise of greater automation, but also its dangers, such as overreliance on technological innovation or premature investment in the wrong strategies. And the fact that many innovative technologies aren’t developed by the people who use them can be problematic, as well, as technologist Chris Skinner points out: “Kids who can code are dramatically changing the financial markets, but they don’t understand the financial markets.” Hence the appeal of aforementioned “low-code” or “no-code” approaches, which put the tools of change in the hands of chief information officers themselves. Readers from the business world will find these chapters invaluable, particularly at present, with the seismic changes that Covid-19 has wrought in how businesses operate. But even readers who are unfamiliar with the nuances of automation will find these experts’ opinions to be compelling, with their sharp, insightful, real-time takes on one of the more dramatic societal shifts in the modern age.
An engaging book of expert business-survival advice for a troubled time.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73573-290-9
Page Count: 166
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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