A powerful call for putting corporate culture first in every aspect of business.
A new view of management and team leadership.
Pokorny, the founder and CEO of Mammoth Leadership Sciences, here propounds his belief that corporate culture is of paramount importance in business. The title of his book derives from his thought-experiment of picturing primitive humans planning to attack a mammoth; in these pages, he wryly imagines a modern business faced with the same challenge: “There would be time, budget, and ROI analyses across multiple departments,” he writes. “Let’s be honest, your team would likely starve before getting close to a single woolly mammoth!” This prompts him to reflect on corporate culture, noting that though this concept is often discussed, it’s seldom enacted: “We spend days, weeks, even months preparing next year’s strategic goals but devote hardly any time to building a strong culture to support our strategic goals.” He structures his suggested remedies under three general headings: people, strategy, and implementation. And he always has a clear eye for the fallibility of humans, imperfect creatures who “like shortcuts, can get greedy … try to dominate others,” and so on. To counteract these shortcomings, he proposes broad protocols under a “Dynamic Stability Framework,” frequently returning to the old idea of not making perfect the enemy of good. “100 percent quick, 70 percent right, and the rest can be fixed later!” he reminds his readers, noting that they’ll never have all of the information they need to make perfect decisions or put them into practice. Pokorny presents these maxims with force and a friendly clarity drawn from decades working in a variety of leadership roles; most of his points resound because they’re obviously distilled from personal experience. His repeated insistence on the importance of baking a unified corporate culture into the DNA of hiring, training, and mentoring might trouble readers who don’t want to live, eat, and breathe their jobs—but they’re clearly not the book’s target audience.
A powerful call for putting corporate culture first in every aspect of business.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781647048433
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2024
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
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
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