As I argued before (read this blog post on the halo effect), we like simple stories that account for a company’s success or failure. These stories are almost always delusional. So, what should you keep in mind when you pick up the latest best-selling business book written by a famous CEO or management thinker? The …
Finally, this last year, long overdue, I picked up Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). And what a book it is. If you still thought you were a rational human being, deliberately making judgements, weighing pros and cons for every decision you make, consider this quote from Thinking Fast and Slow: (..) emotion now …
Holiday Reading List 2018 – The Rationalist Delusion Read More »
In November, I mentioned that Peter Drucker thought of management as a liberal art. Last year I already recommended some contemporary philosophy to broaden your horizons (see, Holiday Reading to Blow Your Mind). In 2017, I picked up some history books that give grand sweeping views of how we ended up in this day and …
2017 Holiday Reading to Blow Your Mind (and expand your perspective) Read More »
When I started this blog, I was determined to write some posts on decision making. I am fascinated with the fact that humans think we are rational beings, while all the latest research (on moral psychology, neuroscience, etc) clearly contradicts this. I have tried to write about what I ‘discovered’ to be true (by reading …
Decision Making: What We Can (Not) Learn from Plato Read More »
Understanding that your reasoning is undermined by bias, is one of the most valuable insights into your own decision making capabilities. I wrote another piece on biases (Morality Binds and Blinds), but the title might have been such that it was my least successful blog entry measured by number of reads. Or, it might just …
Three thinking tools to overcome confirmation bias Read More »
As a preface to this blog entry, forget about the strict definition of redundancy found in the Oxford English dictionary that tells you redundancy means ‘no longer needed or useful’. As will become clear – I hope -, redundancy is needed to have an option to maneuver when things happen that you could not possibly …
All my posts so far have introduced books that I think are well worth reading during your summer break. (See the full list of books referred to in previous posts at the end of this entry.) Why read? Nassim Taleb in Antifragile: . . . the worst thing one can do to feel one knows …
Being influenced in my thinking on business strategy and execution mostly by the work of Igor Ansoff (see Implanting Strategic Management), I have always wondered why business books like In Search of Excellence and Good to Great had such huge success. Ansoff stressed that business performance is highly dependent on the specific environment your business finds itself in …
