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Recent Reviews
Brad Stone
Mixed The Financial Times (UK)(UK) Stone is as much \'a student of organisations, culture, and innovation\' as Bezos, and he shows his admiration for the way in which Amazon continues to use its leverage to grow, and the management techniques the Amazon founder uses. Some, such as the insistence on two-pizza teams (small enough to be fed with two pizzas), are well-known. But there is plenty of fuel here for those seeking to emulate Amazon’s success, even on a small scale ... [Bezos] seems a rather more distant, one-dimensional figure in this book than he was in The Everything Store.
Liaquat Ahamed
Rave The Financial Times Its selection as the \'most compelling and enjoyable\' business book of the past year was also due to the strong parallels between the events Mr Ahamed describes and the events leading to the past two years of economic and financial turmoil.
Stanley McChrystal, with Jeff Eggers and Jason Mangone
Rave The Financial Times To illustrate their point, McChrystal and his co-authors, all former US military men, focus on just six Plutarchan pairs ... The pairings are sometimes surprising, bordering on the eccentric ... But their stories, distilled from many longer biographies, are deftly and compellingly told. The book’s call for a redefinition of leadership as a complex, dynamic system—to which leaders, their followers and the context all contribute—is wise, insightful and timely ... McChrystal’s nuanced assessment of modern leadership also offers the most interesting analysis of Trump’s appeal. The \'Great Man\' theory persists in part because we have a preference for simple explanations of leadership over the messy, difficult reality of leading, he writes. Supporters of the U.S. president would argue that he has registered economic successes; McChrystal points out leadership is often more about what leaders symbolize than what they achieve.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Positive The Financial Times Perhaps inevitably for a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, she has written a...conventional appraisal of leadership, but a highly readable one ... She brilliantly draws the outline of [her subjects\'] lives and the often extraordinary \'crucible experiences\' that marked their path to the White House ... Goodwin makes clear that leadership is not just a story of one person influencing a group towards an outcome, but \'a two-way street\' that links individual character, the contributions of teams and the popular context.