Frictionless: Why the Future of Everything Will Be Fast, Fluid, and Made Just for You

Every successful start-up has helped reduce the “friction,” or inconvenience, of day-to-day life, asserts Lemieux (The Finer Things), founder of The Inside, a home furnishing company, in her snappy but thin survey. Lemieux interviewed more than six dozen entrepreneurs and found each one, in one way or another, trying to reduce inconvenience—whether in pharmacy prescriptions, shaving kits, customized hair care, or office rentals. She warns that in modern business being frictionless isn’t just advantageous, it’s necessary—digital natives won’t bother with products that are anything less. Less time spent on using a good or service means more to spend on family, friends, or oneself, Lemieux writes, and, based on interactions with her own millennial workforce, she believes “found time” is important for younger generations. While Lemieux’s tone is refreshingly salty—millennial workers are “taking back their time from the people [employers] that have been taking it away from the rest of us our whole lives”—the concept of friction reduction is overly familiar, and the frequent plugs for her business are off-putting. There’s little new here. (June)