Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
How Strategy Really Works is a book about strategy, written by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, and Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management. The book covers the …
Explore Farnam Street Articles
What Matters More in Decisions: Analysis or Process?
We all make decisions. Some of them are large and many of them are small. Few of us understand that the process we use to make those decisions is more important than the analysis we put into the …
Notes From Underground
Can you be too conscious? In his short 1864 book, Notes From Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky tells the story of a man who is “too conscious.” The man, whose name we never learn is so aware of his own …
Benoit Mandelbrot — The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick
“I have never done anything like others,” Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) once said. That statement is proven time and time again in his autobiography: The Fractalist. Mandelbrot is …
What Animals Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, believes that her fellow human physicians have much to learn from their veterinary counterparts. These are not …
What is the Purpose of Dreaming? And more on Circadian Rhythms
Continuing with our recent exploration of sleep, I came across this passage by sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright in The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives, …
How You Can Sleep Better
You do want to sleep better, don’t you? Me too. After last weeks post, “If this is sleep research’s golden age, then why are we all so tired?” I picked up a copy of Dreamland: Adventures in the …
TED Bookstore 2013
If you missed out on attending the famous TED conference this year — you’re not alone. But now you can queue up some of the books that were available at the TED Bookstore for your spring reading …
The Paris Review Guide to Becoming a Well-Read, Cultured, and Critically Thinking Person
“I want to be an educated, well-read, cultured, critically thinking person but need some stuff to read,” is the voice of an anonymous reader in the Ask The Paris Review section. The letter …
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning.” — …
Worldly-Wisdom from Charlie Munger
I’m a huge fan of Charlie Munger — Warren Buffett’s right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway. For those of you unfamiliar with him, listening to his famous talk, The Psychology of Human …
Things you should focus on
I wasn’t a huge fan of Think, Act, and Invest Like Warren Buffett: The Winning Strategy to Help You Achieve Your Financial and Life Goals but this anecdote on time management hit a cord with me. …
Richard Zeckhauser on Making Better Decisions
Richard Zeckhauser, aka Mr. Probability, is a champion Bridge player and the Frank Ramsey professor of political economy at Harvard University. Speaking about Zeckhauser, Charlie Munger, the brilliant …
The Science of Addictive Junk Food
Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at The New York Times, just wrote a book called Salt Sugar Fat. Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese …
Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag’s second book, was published in 1966, but some of the essays date back to 1961, when she was still writing for The Benefactor. Sontag had come to New York in …
How You Can Make Brainstorming Better
Brainstorming – getting a group of people together to come up with as many new ideas or solutions to a problem as possible – is a common fixture in many organizations. Generally …