See the movie and read the book or vice versa. Either way, you’re in for a terrific ride. In a riveting fashion, Michael Lewis describes and makes sense out of the 2008 financial collapse that destroyed almost everything in its path. The real key to this story’s success is Lewis’ attention to the eccentric cast of characters. Some saw it coming from as far as a decade away.
It really doesn’t matter what you think of Elon Musk, his story and work are amazing. Musk is one of the few extremely non-risk-averse entrepreneurs out there. He also happens to be talented, smart and not afraid to question, defy and oftentimes battle the status quo. (A LOT like Richard Branson, up next.) The biography by Ashlee Vance is honest, compelling and pulls no punches with Musk’s frequently challenging personality. Take the time to read and get inspired by one of the biggest thinkers alive.
Speaking of non-risk-averse types, let’s talk about Richard Branson. His business and lifestyle motto “Screw it, let’s do it” is tempered by his thoughts on successes and failures in his career. The history alone of how Branson developed into one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time –after an unauspicious start as a sixteen-year-old dropout with dyslexia– makes one sit up and listen.
But it’s his wise and experienced approach on how he chooses to lead with an emphasis on people/relationships and less on formality that makes the book so valuable. Another book by Branson, Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way gets a favorable mention here. Especially or the additional and very entertaining details on how Branson went from magazine publisher, to mail order record business to a recording studio/company to an airlines. And his (ad)ventures in just about every product imaginable. Virgin Cola anyone?
Malcolm Gladwell has critics, but I appreciate his focus and interest in areas I find fascinating. I have been a fan of his since The Tipping Point and Blink. Both books made me reexamine a few ideas I had about the world. And reshaped a lot of the thinking I bring into my daily work. Outliers explores how people become extraordinary (or at least successful in their chosen fields). It isn’t always how you might think.
The founder and editor of FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver gained national celebrity status after his almost exact prediction of the 2008 and 2012 elections. This book examines the difficulty in discerning what is relevant in collected statistics. And what may be simply unnecessary and sometimes misleading information. Anyone interested in analytics, statistics, prediction, numbers, science, economics and “seeking truth from data” will enjoy.
Intriguing book by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. It examines the way our brain processes information. As I listened to this, I wished I was able to do some of the exercises the book asks you to do to help discern its examples. Kahneman presents a very thoughtful and revealing view on how perspectives are easily skewed.
A recent study by Nielsen shows 63% of shoppers research products online.* Youtility mentions as far back as 2011, shoppers accessed 10.4 pieces of information before making a purchase. This provides one of the many foundations upon which Jay Baer [Convince and Convert] lays his case that objective, helpful information is appreciated more than ever before by the consumer. By examining entrepreneurs and businesses providing useful content, Baer points out the payoffs for taking the time to create collateral that may -at first- seem like a lot of effort when compared to traditional marketing tactics. I used this book in teaching Entrepreneurial Marketing. Many students enjoyed it, finding it a refreshing counterpoint to traditional marketing and business tactics. Strongly recommended.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit I read this one as its Machiavellian approach makes you feel as though you’re preparing for a role on Game of Thrones. It basically serves as a primer on how to manipulate your way into getting what you want. If you work in an environment of snakes (and this book assures you everyone -including yourself- is a snake) then this is the book to read. However, there is some good advice in its pages. And quite a few in business have read it, along with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. You might as well arm yourself so you can see ’em coming.
That’s all for now. I’ll update as I come across new books worthy of note. Please leave any suggestions for books that you have particularly enjoyed in the comments below!
As you start out the new year and put together content plans, here is some very helpful advice from Entrepreneur for those outsourcing their content.
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Richard Branson knows something that propels not only his passenger jets but also his businesses to rapid and ever-increasing success — he embraces letting go and outsourcing.
And with the rise of the Internet and the need to create consistent content, outsourcing has become incredibly common. In fact, Patricio Robles cites research that shows 79 percent of companies are embracing content marketing, while Statistica recently reported that the global market size of outsourced services in 2014 was $104.6 billion dollars.
Being at the top of your game with content is essential, as the value of great content drives leads and results in more sales. But before you go jumping into the deep end of outsourcing content creation, there are a few things you’ll want to consider, so that you can not only approach it the right way but also protect you and your business from any negative repercussions down the road.
In order to hire great content creators not to mention put together the kind of contract we’ll discuss shortly, you have to first define what types of content you need.
Identifying the specific types of content needed may not appear to be a legal step. However, at the outset, these are incredibly important things to consider, all of which will enable you to outline both your job advertisement and various aspects of your contractual agreement.
2. Assign copyright.
The act of simply paying someone does not automatically turn over copyright of that content to the end user. Unless you specifically list the terms of use in your contract, the content creator maintains ownership of that content. In this case, you only have an implied license, therefore, you’ll need express permission to re-purpose any of that content for other things, such as turning a blog post into an ebook or social-media posts.
It’s also important that you consider protection against indemnification for images or content that may be the property of others. At the end of the day, you will be responsible if the content published on your site or in your materials is found to breach copyright law.
For text-based copy, using a service such as Copyscape is standard practice. But with image attribution, this is particularly difficult, since there’s no good way to test the copyright short of either buying the rights or waiting for an angry digital millennium copyright act notice from the infringed-upon owner.
Be as specific as possible when outlining requirements so that freelancers know your expectations, including benchmarking and measuring success or failure. You may also want to include a Service Level Agreement that clearly outlines performance details and standards. Licensed attorney Ruth Carter provides this list of questions to consider, some of which touch on things I’ll cover later on in this article.
4. Consider legal liabilities in your content.
You may need to take further precautions if the content you’ll be outsourcing is subject to any regulatory requirements. For instance, if you’re publishing medical content or financial advice, you may need to include relevant disclaimers or ensure materials produced meet certain standards to protect yourself legally.
If the content you publish on your website is something you could be held legally liable for, be sure your outsourced creators are able to meet any necessary requirements.
5. Preparing in advance for termination.
Ideally, you’ll find in a freelancer a long-term partnership for your content creation needs. But since turnover is inevitable, it’s far better to protect yourself up front. As Sion King of Rider University says: “Your termination clause is hugely important, as it sets forth the conditions under which the customer may exit the outsourcing relationship.”
The termination clause needs to outline the common reasons that give rights to you and your company to exit the clause along with the rights of the contractor. It’s also wise to include both party’s respective rights upon termination with regards to ongoing privacy and protection here as well.
6. Put it all in a contract.
Now that you’ve covered all your legal bases, document them in a formal written contract that both you and your freelancers will sign. In most cases, it’s a good idea to consult with an actual lawyer to do this. However, you can get started by finding sample contract agreements to work from. William Engelke provides some great tips and points to consider when outlining your outsourcing contract over here.
7. Take out an insurance policy.
Last, but not least — and let’s keep it short and sweet — it’s definitely worth investing in an insurance policy when it comes to protecting your legal rights as a content creator and purchaser. At the end of the day, you need to be prepared for any legal ramifications that could occur from the content you publish — or, at the very least, be fully aware of who’s liable for anything that may occur.
Though the Internet has blurred the rules and lines of outsourcing somewhat, it’s best to stick to guidelines and follow the rules to protect yourself. If you have any doubts, consult a lawyer.
What have you done to manage your outsourcing in terms of legal requirements? Share your thoughts and insights in the comments below.
For business professors, time is always an issue. What do you think? Originally posted in HBR.
Today, more and more students, parents, and taxpayers are demanding a greater return for the cost of college education. TheEconomisthas called it a “revolution” and a “cost crisis” in university education. People are justifiably asking whether there is a reasonable return on their tuition investment and business schools are arguably under the microscope most of all.
This is a pendulum swing from the 1950s when research by the Ford and Carnegie foundations found too much of a focus on vocational training, and business education was criticized for being overly technical and applied. Business schools responded. Now, years later, educators have been criticized for going too far. One notable critic, Warren Bennis, a renowned leadership scholar from the University of Southern California, states that business schools have “an overemphasis on the rigor and an underemphasis on relevance.”
Some business schools have responded by hiring professors of practice, or industry executives without PhDs. The question remains as to whether there is a role for classically trained professors in business schools of the future. Or is it time for business professors to go back to work?
One of us, Holly Brower, decided to put this question to the test. Brower designed a faculty “externship” where she left her university office and for two months become part of global pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly’s daily operations. Rather than act as an outside consultant, she would work as an insider. Brower, along with other colleagues, had from time to time worked as a consultant for companies. These experiences, while helpful to understand contemporary business problems, quickly placed her in the role of teacher/adviser and the company as client. Brower was looking for a different type of experience with a more level playing field. Though short, the immersion within Eli Lilly offered her a litmus test for the material she teaches and researches.
With a company sponsor who was clearly open minded and inquisitive, and her expertise as a leadership scholar, together they mapped out a problem that Eli Lilly was working to resolve — their leadership programs across the globe needed a streamlined framework. She provided both expertise and an apolitical lens to build the new model.
In a separate externship, as part of KPMG’s Professor in Residence Program, a tax professor worked closely with a global team of accountants on implications of tax codes across South America. The project gave the professor a fresh look at the challenges his students would face as tax professionals and gave the accountants a chance to offer input into the professor’s research. As academic articles become sources for textbooks, this early feedback into academic research is critical, and the relevant work experience enhances class examples and coaching of students.
Though faculty externships are rare and there is not a “typical” model, we conducted a series of interviews with interested executives and professors with their own faculty externship experiences to construct a beta-tested protocol for a successful externship. These include identifying an internal sponsor for the faculty extern; an extern who fits with the company culture; and a clear project that is both related to the extern’s expertise and offers value to the company. This project should have specific start and end dates, and clear deliverables. The extern and the company should also come to a clear agreement about confidentiality rules. Once the externship begins, the internal sponsor should communicate the nature of the project and the background of the faculty extern, and help plan interactions such as lunch and learns between the faculty extern and employees. Finally, every externship should end with a debriefing.
One marketing executive who hosted an extern at IBM said of the weekly lunch and learn presentation: “The professor’s lunchtime talk was highly attended and received great feedback. Since many of us do not have a legal background, it was helpful to hear her points of view on how the law is impacting advertising. It was also great having her in smaller group meetings, getting to hear her points of view.”
While externships offer value, both faculty and executives resist the practice for a number of reasons. For companies, including a professor in daily operations can come with angst about whether or not that professor will fit in a positive way that doesn’t require too much “handholding.” The selection of the right extern is critical to find an ideal match. For professors, aside from a few limited exceptions, university norms and incentives currently do not support externships. While the academy values primary research on questions with managerial implications, there are strong trade-offs between working within a company, even for a limited time, and crafting a journal article.
There is also the question of whether professors are in fact more effective having some distance from business. Can more enduring perspectives be better taught through an outside view? Is the real problem not what is being taught in business schools, but instead what is being practiced by businesses? Like most interesting questions, perhaps the answer is “both.”
Holly Henderson Brower (Ph.D., Purdue University) is an Associate Professor at the School of Business at Wake Forest University where she also is the faculty director of the internship program. She consults and publishes on issues related to trust, leadership and effective decision making in both nonprofit and for-profit organizations.
Michelle D. Steward (Ph.D., Arizona State University) is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the School of Business at Wake Forest University. Michelle’s research interests are in the area of business-to-business marketing.
At some point during the launch of your startup, it’s likely that a potential investor will ask you about your company’s mission statement. Many business management experts would argue that this should be your company’s cornerstone, inspiring and informing your employees in the years ahead. I can’t agree. The Virgin Group does have a mission statement — one that is brief and to the point. In general, there is too much importance being placed on such statements, but it is interesting to see how they reflect common missteps in business.
Most mission statements are full of blah truisms and are anything but inspirational. A company’s employees don’t really need to be told that “The mission of XYZ Widgets is to make the best widgets in the world while providing excellent service.” They must think, “As opposed to what? Making the worst widgets and offering the lousiest service?” Such statements show that management lacks imagination, and perhaps in some cases, direction.
At the opposite end of the scale is the statement that fails through flowery waffling. An example: “Yahoo powers and delights our communities of users, advertisers and publishers – all of us united in creating indispensable experiences, and fueled by trust.” That sounds wonderful, but what does it mean? Whoever wrote it should try listening to the company’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, who said in a recent speech, “Yahoo is about making the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining.” It’s not perfect, but it would be a step in the right direction.
Some companies are not actually able to carry out their mission. The reasons can range from a disruption in the markets to a merger or acquisition, and then there are cases like Enron’s: Before the giant energy company went bankrupt in 2001, ruining the lives of tens of thousands of employees and investors, its vision and values statement was “Respect, integrity, communication and excellence.” Say no more!
While some mission statements consist of one vague statement, others are too long, which may reflect management’s lack of understanding of what a company really does. The Warwickshire Police recently produced a new mission statement; to the police chief’s dismay, the resulting 1,200-word screed gained the attention of the media and was nominated for the Golden Bull award “for excellence in gobbledygook” from the Plain English Campaign, a group that helps organizations to provide clear communications. Not only was the rambling epistle filled with buzzwords and jargon, but the word “crime” was not mentioned once.
Still other companies don’t know what differentiates them from their competition. The mission statement for the pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers reads, “To discover, develop and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail over serious diseases.” Well, you can’t argue with that, but surely this can be said of every drug company on the planet. Why would a person choose to buy Bristol-Myers’ products or invest in its stock, rather than its competitors’?
So that’s what not to do. If you are in a situation where you must write a mission statement, I think you should try for something closer to a heraldic motto than a speech. They were often simple because they had to fit across the bottom of a coat of arms, and they were long-lasting because they reflected a group’s deeper values.
When I was a boy, I was fascinated by such mottoes. One of my childhood heroes was the pilot Douglas Bader, who lost both his legs in a crash early in his career, but went on to fly fighter planes for the Royal Air Force during WWII. After seeing the movie “Reach for the Sky,” which told his heroic story, I remember asking my father about the RAF motto, “Per ardua ad astra.” When he told me that it meant, “Through adversity to the stars,” I thought the idea of battling one’s way to the stars at all costs was the most inspiring thing I’d ever heard. (It’s pretty similar to the “Toy Story” character Buzz Lightyear’s motto, “To infinity and beyond,” which some kids today think is pretty cool – especially some of my friends on the Virgin Galactic crew.)
A few years later, at Stowe School, I was taught the school’s motto, “Persto et praesto,” which means “I stand firm and I stand first.” This motto caused a lot of giggling among our group of adolescent schoolboys, but it was nevertheless excellent for guiding us forward into adult life. Brevity is certainly key, so try using Twitter’s 140-character template when you’re drafting your inspirational message. You need to explain your company’s purpose and outline expectations for internal and external clients alike. Make it unique to your company, make it memorable, keep it real and, just for fun, imagine it on the bottom of a coat of arms.
If we had to put ours on a coat of arms, Virgin’s would probably say something like, “Ipsum sine timore, consector,” which very loosely translated from the Latin means, “Screw it, let’s do it!”
Setting up a new digital ad campaign or hiring an agency/someone to do it? Read this Harvard Business Review article on some techniques of which to be aware and that can often overstate performance for a given tactic.
HBR Staff
Imagine you run a retail store and hire a leafleteer to distribute handbills to attract new customers. You might assess her effectiveness by counting the number of customers who arrived carrying her handbill and, perhaps, presenting it for a discount. But suppose you realized the leafleteer was standing just outside your store’s front door, giving handbills to everyone on their way in. The measured “effectiveness” would be a ruse, merely counting customers who would have come in anyway. You’d be furious and would fire her in an instant. Fortunately, that wouldn’t actually be needed: anticipating being found out, few leafleteers would attempt such a scheme.
In online advertising, a variety of equally brazen ruses drain advertisers’ budgets — but usually it’s more difficult for advertisers to notice them. I’ve been writing about this problem since 2004, and doing my best to help advertisers avoid it.
Overstating the Effectiveness of Sponsored Search Campaigns
A first manifestation of the problem arises in sponsored search. Suppose a user goes to Google and searches for eBay. Historically, the top-most link to eBay would be a paid advertisement, requiring eBay to pay Google each time the ad was clicked. These eBay ads had excellent measured performance in that many users clicked such an ad, then went on to bid or buy with high probability. But step back a bit. A user has already searched for “eBay.” That user is likely to buy from eBay whether or not eBay advertises with Google. In a remarkable experiment, economist Steve Tadelis and coauthors turned off eBay’s trademark-triggered advertising in about half the cities in the U.S. They found that sales in those regions stayed the same even as eBay’s advertising expenditure dropped. eBay’s measure of ad effectiveness was totally off-base and had led to millions of dollars of overspending.
Now, eBay is unusual in its dominance of U.S. consumer auctions. Your company is probably less fortunate in the markets it serves, and if you don’t buy your trademark as a keyword to show your search ads, Google will try to sell your trademark to your competitors, a tactic which some courts have allowed. But if a user searches for Dell, an ad for a competitor like Lenovo tends to underperform. Some users may be willing to consider an alternative at Google’s suggestion, and others may be tricked or not realize the difference, but at least a portion will recognize that Lenovo is something else entirely.
A recent study by researchers at the University of Chicago generalizes these methods and shows that buying your own trademark tends not to be as good an investment as standard measurement tools suggest. Tempting as it may be to increase spending on these (supposedly) “top-performing” keywords, I’d advise the opposite: Cut them, perhaps all the way to zero.
Overtargeting Display Ads
Another problem arises with “retargeting,” which recognizes consumers who didn’t make purchases. The logic: if you went to Expedia and looked at a hotel but didn’t make a reservation, Expedia will arrange for its ad to be shown as you browse the web in the coming days. The banners can be eerily precise, often promoting the specific properties you considered. This approach makes it easy to click back to where you were and complete the purchase.
Here too, standard metrics indicate that the campaign works. No doubt the folks who browsed at Expedia are good candidates for buying from Expedia. Showing banners may remind them to do so. But how many of them would have made a purchase anyway? Certainly not zero. (Consider the traveler who was waiting to finalize his itinerary, perhaps awaiting confirmation from a friend or a business associate.) Yet most measures of ad effectiveness will give full credit to the retargeting vendor — asserting, falsely, that had it not been for the retargeting banner, the user would not have purchased. This hasty analysis leads advertisers to run retargeting campaigns that appear to yield profitable purchases more than sufficient to cover retargeting costs. But if an advertiser considers that some of the sales would have happened anyway, the appeal of retargeting campaigns necessarily diminishes.
It turns out that even demographic targeting of banner ads (without retargeting) is also at risk. Suppose your company is fortunate enough to enjoy popularity with a given demographic group — say, 40% market share among men aged 18 to 25. You might target banner ads to that same group, hoping to reach the 60% of customers in this group that you don’t yet serve. But remember that you’ll also be addressing the many customers that already use your offering. You might falsely attribute “success” to a campaign that prompted purchases from the customers who were going to buy from you regardless.
My advice: try a randomized experiment. Take a portion of the users who would have seen a retargeting campaign or a demographically-targeted campaign. Rather than showing them your ad, decline to advertise to them, and track how many of them buy anyway. If 20% of them still make a purchase, your ads are actually 20% less effective than basic measurements would suggest.
Paying for Affiliate Sales That Would Have Happened Anyway
Affiliate marketing is supposed to align incentives perfectly, paying only for success — like a 10% commission if a user actually buys a given product, but zero for impressions and clicks. Is fraud “impossible,” as some have claimed? Not at all.
Consider a sneaky affiliate who “stuffs” a cookie on every user’s computer as the user browses an unrelated web site. With a moderately popular site (or a banner or widget on someone else’s site), this “cookie-stuffer” might claim to have referred millions of users to a given merchant. Some of those users are bound to make purchases, and the merchant will pay the affiliate a commission as if it truly caused the user’s sale. Worse, the merchant is unlikely to suspect the problem; with real sales, merchants are often slow to realize that some customers’ decisions are uninfluenced by any affiliate marketing activity.
Mere speculation, you worry? Not so. In 2008 indictments in San Francisco, Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning were charged with wire fraud for using these methods to claim more than $20 million from eBay. They were, for a time, eBay’s largest two affiliates, and they report that eBay wooed them with dedicated account managers, chartered jets, and more. Only years later did eBay realize it was being swindled. (Disclosure: I advise eBay on certain aspects of affiliate marketing fraud, and litigation records indicate that I uncovered Hogan and Dunning’s activities.)
The take-away: if you run an affiliate marketing program, you shouldn’t assume it’s fraud-free. A good start is to know your affiliates — browse their sites to examine their offers and approach. Some affiliates try to keep their sites secret, claiming that merchants might copy their proprietary methods. I can understand their worry, but if they want to get paid, they should expect reasonable oversight. If an affiliate’s site doesn’t look quite right — too ragged for the volume it reports, too hasty, or otherwise not quite right — you should push for specifics and check third-party sources like affiliate network staff, server logs, and online discussion forums to try to confirm your suspicions.
Measuring Success When Adware Intervenes
When users’ computers are infected with advertising software like adware and malware, advertisers are at still greater risk of being separated from their money with little to show for it. I’ve tracked adware that covers advertisers’ sites with their own pay-per-click ads, so that a user browsing (say) rcn.com sees paid links for RCN rather than (or on top of) the genuine RCN site, prompting unnecessary clicks. I’ve found banner injectors that insert ads into other companies’ web pages without permission from those pages, and certainly without paying those pages’ publishers. Remarkably, some injectors insert an advertiser’s banner ad into its own web site — a particularly outrageous scam against the advertiser, which then pays to retain a user it already serves. (An example is Revizer adware and ad network Criteo charging Zappos for users already on Zappos.com.) Adware can also monitor a user’s browsing, then invoke the affiliate link to the site a user is about to buy from.
Adware tends to be particularly tricky to uncover since testing is so difficult. Advertisers are rarely willing to set up testing labs to see adware in action first-hand. As a stopgap, consider insisting on higher standards from responsible networks. Revise contracts to allow for clawback of any payments later shown to result from adware. While you’re at it, you might look for one-sided terms throughout an ad network’s contract; ad network defaults tend to protect their interests only, disclaiming every possible warranty or guarantee to leave advertisers vulnerable if anything goes wrong.
The Way Forward: Aligning Incentives for Marketing Managers
It’s probably no surprise that advertising networks offer services that aren’t in advertisers’ best interests. An ad network is an advertiser’s vendor — fundamentally, not a genuine partner or ally, but a supplier whose direct interest is charging more for doing less. Savvy advertisers should view the relationship accordingly.
How about ad agencies and advertising buyers? Advertisers often pressure agencies and buyers to deliver near-impossible results. They often face tough demands — “20% more customers for 10% less money” and so forth — and cutting corners can feel almost unavoidable. I understand advertisers’ insistence on results, and I share it. But when measurement is imperfect, an excessive focus on measured results invites vendors to game the system with tactics that advance measured indicators without genuine results.
I’ve even seen instances in which a company’s in-house staff become complicit, knowing that vendors are up to no good, but afraid to call them out on it. Companies almost invite this behavior through bonuses and performance objectives — “$10k extra if you increase ROI by 10%” — yielding temptations too enticing for some to resist.
Advertising is hard work. Short of the rare product that practically sells itself, advertisers and their vendors should expect to hustle to find scalable and cost-effective methods. When you see a new tactic delivering outsized results, you might ask yourself whether it’s too good to be true. Sadly, often it is.
See the movie and read the book or vice versa. Either way, you’re in for a terrific ride. In a riveting fashion, Michael Lewis describes and makes sense out of the 2008 financial collapse that destroyed almost everything in its path. The real key to this story’s success is Lewis’ attention to the eccentric cast of characters. Some saw it coming from as far as a decade away.
It really doesn’t matter what you think of Elon Musk, his story and work are amazing. Musk is one of the few extremely non-risk-averse entrepreneurs out there. He also happens to be talented, smart and not afraid to question, defy and oftentimes battle the status quo. (A LOT like Richard Branson, up next.) The biography by Ashlee Vance is honest, compelling and pulls no punches with Musk’s frequently challenging personality. Take the time to read and get inspired by one of the biggest thinkers alive.
Speaking of non-risk-averse types, let’s talk about Richard Branson. His business and lifestyle motto “Screw it, let’s do it” is tempered by his thoughts on successes and failures in his career. The history alone of how Branson developed into one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time –after an unauspicious start as a sixteen-year-old dropout with dyslexia– makes one sit up and listen.
Malcolm Gladwell has critics, but I appreciate his focus and interest in areas I find fascinating. I have been a fan of his since The Tipping Point and Blink. Both books made me reexamine a few ideas I had about the world. And reshaped a lot of the thinking I bring into my daily work. Outliers explores how people become extraordinary (or at least successful in their chosen fields). It isn’t always how you might think.
The founder and editor of FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver gained national celebrity status after his almost exact prediction of the 2008 and 2012 elections. This book examines the difficulty in discerning what is relevant in collected statistics. And what may be simply unnecessary and sometimes misleading information. Anyone interested in analytics, statistics, prediction, numbers, science, economics and “seeking truth from data” will enjoy.
Intriguing book by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. It examines the way our brain processes information. As I listened to this, I wished I was able to do some of the exercises the book asks you to do to help discern its examples. Kahneman presents a very thoughtful and revealing view on how perspectives are easily skewed.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit I read this one as its Machiavellian approach makes you feel as though you’re preparing for a role on Game of Thrones. It basically serves as a primer on how to manipulate your way into getting what you want. If you work in an environment of snakes (and this book assures you everyone -including yourself- is a snake) then this is the book to read. However, there is some good advice in its pages. And quite a few in business have read it, along with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. You might as well arm yourself so you can see ’em coming.
