An instructional guide hampered by a lack of specificity.
A general guide to starting a business in an age of artificial intelligence and employment insecurity.
Smith shrewdly observes that the breakneck pace of technological progress, especially regarding artificial intelligence, is upending traditional forms of employment. (“The old model of a person working for years to climb up the corporate ladder is broken.”) Virtually no one’s job is immune to the “brutal logic” of corporate streamlining, which reduces even the best workers to “interchangeable work units,” per the author. Smith posits that, amidst this intensifying precariousness, the only sure path to financial freedom is to create a business of one’s own. In this concise instructional manual (the text is a bit over 150 pages in length), the author introduces various brainstorming techniques designed to generate new business ideas, running the gamut from reconnecting with old “school chums” to striking up conversations with strangers, counsel that is as sensible as it is unspectacular. A significant portion of the book is devoted to the establishment of the business once a concept has been formed—Smith addresses the naming of the concern, the composition of a business plan, social media marketing, and many other related issues in a clear fashion. The author also discusses his own professional life as a military combat engineer and geologist and the lessons he’s learned over the years regarding the management of loneliness and ill health. Smith’s advice is consistently prudent if not particularly original—he encourages the reader to exercise, eat well, avoid the “temptation and perils of alcohol and drugs,” and find solace in creative work. (“Change from worry to planning. Switching from continually worrying about present problems to doing something creative with your business is mental relaxation and mental work at the same time.”) In the most concretely helpful section of the work, the author explains how one can use various AI programs to assist with the writing of a book. Unfortunately, this book, as a whole, is excessively general in its guidance and too often traffics in platitudes.
An instructional guide hampered by a lack of specificity.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781967776016
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Authors' Tranquility Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2025
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
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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