Bounce
Matthew Syed
HarperCollins
Most of the books for this monthly list are our own choices, but a
friend gave us this book, perhaps as a hint to improve our own
professional performance. Author Matthew Syed, a world champion
table tennis player, looks at the factors that determine personal
success, starting with athletes and others in competitive
activities, including chess. What he finds, and supports through
dozens of scientific examples, is that hard work pays off. The
truly successful competitors are those who engage in purposeful
practice. It's not just going to the driving range and hitting a
bucket of balls, but rather working in a manner to perfect the
mechanics and then obtaining useful feedback. The learning
professional will find wonderful new examples to support
experiential learning efforts from skeptical CEOs, especially if
they are golf fans.
The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of
Defying Logic at Work and at Home
Dan Ariely
HarperCollins
This is the follow up to the engaging bestseller Predictably
Irrational. Ariely challenges us to understand why huge bonuses
paid to CEOs can make them less productive, and similar conundrums.
Or perhaps even more confusing, why the things that we think will
make us happy do just the opposite. Publishers Weekly notes: "After
a youthful accident left him badly scarred and facing grueling
physical therapy, Ariely's treatment required him to accept
temporary pain for long-term benefit - a trade-off so antithetical
to normal human behavior that it sparked the author's fascination
with why we consistently fail to act in our own best interest. He
concludes with prescriptions for how to make real personal and
societal changes, and what behavioral patterns we must identify to
improve how we love, live, work, innovate, manage, and govern."
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions
Deceive Us
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
Crown
Most of us have some wonderful memories of some event that have
become a standard party story, and often these amusing tales are
not quite truthful. Not that we are lying, it's just that we think
our perceptions and memories are a lot better than they really are.
Enter authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The pair of
psychology professors suggests that six illusions of perception and
thought are less reliable than we think. These include the beliefs
that we pay attention more than we do, our memories are more
detailed than they are, confident people are competent people, we
know more than we actually do, and our brains have reserves of
power that are easy to unlock. Publishers Weekly notes: "Presented
almost as a response to Malcolm Gladwell's blink, the book pays
special attention to 'the illusion of knowledge' and the danger of
basing decisions in areas, such as investing, on short-term
information; in the authors' view, careful analysis of assumed
truths is preferred over quick, intuitive thinking."
Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us and How to Know When not
to Trust Them
David H. Freedman
Little, Brown and Company
From meltdowns of financial markets to oil spill disasters, it is
easy to see recent examples when experts were dead wrong. Frankly,
it often leads us to not believe anyone about anything. "We are, as
Mr. Freedman puts it, living in an age of 'punctuated wrongness,'
usually misled, occasionally enlightened," writes Trevor
Butterworth of The Wall Street Journal. "His goal is a broad
account of this phenomenon, how it takes shape through specific
problems in measurement, how it spreads through the general idiocy
of crowds, and how we might identify and avoid it. [Mr. Freedman]
turns to the right kind of experts to articulate general
principles, such as biostatisticians, for example, who can see
deeper than the average scientist into the way the data are
gathered, analyzed, and screwed up. What makes Wrong so right - it
being as good as any general account of the fragility of what we
take as expert knowledge - is that it raises the right questions."