Books and Me

By Gary Klein (2017) For reasons that now completely escape me, I started out skeptically with this book  but somewhere in the course of it, I have been completely persuaded and have just finished it in a flurry of committed appreciation.  This is probably partially because it is a less depressing read than many of the behavioural economics books I have been reading lately, but more constructively it is also because I now feel I have a bit more of a handle on how to generate new ideas more easily and often. The author approaches the matter of how insights are generated through naturalistic research - taking 120 examples of moments where insights have occurred in real life rather than from experiments in a laboratory, and as a result, he generates a richness of understanding that more controlled testing would and has missed. In the process, Klein provides a very welcome corrective to the heuristics and biases movement which is often lab based and which is often terr...

by Daniel Pink (2018) For someone utterly terrified by the concept of selling, I was, by the end of the book , brought into the idea that, one way or another, we are all selling pretty much all the time, so I had better bite the bullet and get better at it.   Given that my previous knowledge is next to zero, I was completely sold on 100% of the suggestions which came neatly chunked and presented with persuasive anecdotes in a way that clearly suggests that Pink has imbibed his own messages.  Reviews elsewhere suggest that the research (which is amply referenced) may either be stretched for the purposes of the argument or may not be rigorous in the first place, but frankly I didn't care.  Any suggestions are welcome and all seem broadly sensible.  The sheer volume of ideas, even though they are clearly sorted in a well constructed system, does mean that unless one has a pretty good memory, one will have to revisit the book to mug up on the finer de...