Your Environment Shapes Your Decisions
When it comes to making decisions, your environment matters. Just as it’s hard to eat healthily if your kitchen is full of junk food, it’s hard to make good decisions when you’re too …
Decision Making
The Two Types of Ignorance
The first category of ignorance is when we do not know we are ignorant. This is primary ignorance. The second category of ignorance is when we recognize our ignorance. *** This article builds on …
Atul Gawande: Why We Fail
“Failures of ignorance we can forgive. If the knowledge of the best thing to do in a given situation does not exist, we are happy to have people simply make their best effort. But if the …
Beyond Email: What Knowledge Workers Really Create
Knowledge workers often think they produce emails (and meetings), but this misses something fundamental. As Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman explained to journalist Jason Zweig, what knowledge workers …
Temperament is more important than IQ
During a recent interview Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger had some interesting comments on how to outsmart people who are smarter than you. Munger: We’ve learned how to outsmart people who are …
Decisions Under Uncertainty
If you’re a knowledge worker you make decisions every day. In fact, whether you realize it or not, decisions are your job. Decisions are how you make a living. Of course, not every decision is …
The Decision Maker’s Edge: Why Less Data Beats Analysis Paralysis
The more information you gather before making a decision, the more likely you are to make a poor choice. Sound crazy? Keep reading. The Raw Truth About Information Overload We’ve all been there: …
William Morris: Adventures in Decision-Making
This isn’t my advice, it comes from the 1973 book How to Get Rich Slowly, But Almost Surely: Adventures in Decision-Making by William Morris. “It’s foolish,” Morris writes, “to suppose that anyone …
The Hidden Edge: What Baseball’s Greatest Hitter Can Teach Us About Decision-Making
Great decisions come from understanding where you have an advantage. Ted Williams, baseball’s last .400 hitter, demonstrated this principle through a remarkably systematic approach to hitting. …
Elements of Effective Thinking
Do you want to come up with more imaginative ideas? Do you stumble with complicated problems? Do you want to find new ways to confront challenges? Of course, you do. So do I. But when is the last time …
The Biggest Barrier to Accomplishing Great Things
At some point, we’ve all likely given up on trying to get better at a skill and settled for being mediocre as opposed to being great. But why do we do this? Why don’t we push on until we achieve …
Understanding and Diagnosing Problems
We all know one, the Monday morning quarterback. They walk into the meeting room primed and ready for action. Ready that is, to apply the knowledge they know now to decisions of the past. And too …
The Scroll of the Scribes
King Solomon, thought by some to be the wisest man who ever lived, anticipated the economists concept of separating equilibria by about 3,000 years. In his most famous case, he proposed cutting a baby …
Opinions and Organizational Theory
When I think about the world in which we live and the organizations in which we work, I can’t help but think that few people have the intellectual honesty, time, and discipline required to hold a …
The Munger Two Step
A simple and easy approach to decision making that prevents us from being manipulated. Understand the forces at play. Understand how your subconscious might be leading you astray. *** While most of us …
The Destructive Influence of Imaginary Peers
Tina Rosenberg with a thoughtful op-ed in the NYT on the influence people around us have on our decisions, even, oddly, when they are imaginary. Bad behavior is usually more visible than good. It’s …