(Portfolio/Penguin, $26)
Given today’s political climate, Andy Kessler’s latest book might be promoting something worse than cannibalism, said Beth Luberecki in The Washington Post. The former venture capitalist has distilled his tips on finding “the next big thing” to 13 principles, and he doesn’t mind saying that a good entrepreneur requires an appetite for eliminating jobs. Technologies that create great wealth are usually “about” displacing human labor, he says, and the market can be trusted to replace the old jobs with better ones. His best insights similarly stress increased productivity as the route to better lives for all, said Dave Kansas in The Wall Street Journal. “Waste what’s abundant,” he says, meaning cheap resources should be fully exploited in service of creating rarer commodities. “When in doubt, get horizontal” means no firm should bother trying to “do it all.” Kessler probably could have “whittled down” his 13 points, but he lays them all out with “confidence and verve.”
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