The Power of Thinking without Thinking
By Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown & Company, 2005
Human beings make sense of a situation in two different ways. The first is the conscious approach. They think about what they have learned, and eventually come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and deliberate. The second strategy does not weigh all the evidence. It considers only what can be gathered at a glance. Recall the old proverb,"First impression is the best impression."
This book by Malcolm Gladwell, one of the most influential writers of our times is all about when each approach works best. It is about what we can do to ensure that the first impression does not lead to a hasty or wrong conclusion. It is about the kind of expertise and skills we need to develop to ensure that we become good at split second decision making. Gladwell’s books are always unique and insightful. This book is no exception.
We tend to assume that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that goes into making it. But in many situations, decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. The part of our brain that leaps to conclusions at a glance is called the adaptive unconscious. It acts as a giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings. Come to think of it, this ability has played a significant role in the shaping of human civilization. Human beings have survived as a species for so long because they have developed the capability to make very quick judgments based on very little information.
"Thin-slicing" refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. Thin-slicing can be a very useful competence for managers. At the same time, the unconscious though a powerful force,can be fallible. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled. So, when should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them? This book is about how snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Friday, July 27, 2007
Social Intelligence-The new science of human relationships
Social Intelligence-The new science of human relationships
By Daniel Goleman, Hutchinson, 2006
In this book, Daniel Goleman, explores an emerging new science with major implications for our interpersonal world. Human beings are designed for sociability and are constantly engaged in a neural ballet that connects them brain-to-brain with those around. Goleman points out that human beings have a built in bias towards empathy, cooperation and altruism. Social intelligence can help them to nurture and develop these capacities.
This book deals with the social aspects of intelligence, i.e. how our brains work when we are in groups. The social brain refers to the neural mechanisms that coordinate our interactions as well as thoughts and feelings about people and our relationships. The social brain is the only biological system in our bodies that continually influences and in turn becomes influenced by the internal state of the people we are with. All other biological systems mainly regulate their activity in response to signals emerging from within our body.
Social intelligence has two components:
A) Social awareness
B) Social facility
Social awareness includes:
1) Primal empathy : Feeling with others , sensing emotional signals.
2) Attunement : Listening with full receptivity
3) Empathic accuracy : Understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings and intentions
4) Social cognition : Knowing how the social world works.
Social facility includes:
1) Synchrony : Interacting smoothly at the verbal level
2) Self presentation : Presenting ourselves effectively
3) Influence : Shaping the outcome of social interactions
4) Concern : Caring about others’ needs and acting accordingly.
Read this book to know more about social intelligence.
By Daniel Goleman, Hutchinson, 2006
In this book, Daniel Goleman, explores an emerging new science with major implications for our interpersonal world. Human beings are designed for sociability and are constantly engaged in a neural ballet that connects them brain-to-brain with those around. Goleman points out that human beings have a built in bias towards empathy, cooperation and altruism. Social intelligence can help them to nurture and develop these capacities.
This book deals with the social aspects of intelligence, i.e. how our brains work when we are in groups. The social brain refers to the neural mechanisms that coordinate our interactions as well as thoughts and feelings about people and our relationships. The social brain is the only biological system in our bodies that continually influences and in turn becomes influenced by the internal state of the people we are with. All other biological systems mainly regulate their activity in response to signals emerging from within our body.
Social intelligence has two components:
A) Social awareness
B) Social facility
Social awareness includes:
1) Primal empathy : Feeling with others , sensing emotional signals.
2) Attunement : Listening with full receptivity
3) Empathic accuracy : Understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings and intentions
4) Social cognition : Knowing how the social world works.
Social facility includes:
1) Synchrony : Interacting smoothly at the verbal level
2) Self presentation : Presenting ourselves effectively
3) Influence : Shaping the outcome of social interactions
4) Concern : Caring about others’ needs and acting accordingly.
Read this book to know more about social intelligence.
THE MEDICI EFFECT
THE MEDICI EFFECT
Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts & Cultures
Frans Johansson
Harvard Business School Press, 2004
This fascinating book tells us about working at the intersection of different fields to generate and implement creative ideas. Opportunities to innovate may be limited within a field. But they multiply when different fields are combined. That is the key message in this book.
The key difference between a field and an intersection of fields lies in how concepts within them are combined. When we operate within a field, we can combine concepts within that particular field, generating ideas that evolve along a particular direction. The author calls them directional ideas. When we work at the intersection, we combine concepts between multiple fields, generating ideas that leap in new directions. The author calls them intersectional ideas.
Directional innovation improves a product in fairly predictable steps, along a well-defined dimension. The goal is to evolve an established idea by using refinements and adjustments. The rewards are reasonably predictable and attained without a long gestation period.
Intersectional innovations, on the other hand, pave the way for a new field. They often make it possible for the people who originated them to become the leaders in the fields they created. Intersectional innovations do not require as much depth of expertise as directional innovation and can be executed by seemingly ordinary people.
For most of us, the best chance to innovate lies at the intersection. Not only is the probability of finding remarkable idea combinations greater there, we will also find many more of them.
There are three distinct forces behind the rise of intersections.
The movement of people is on the rise everywhere. This is facilitating cultural intersections in fields such as cinema, literature, music, and art. Businesses, too, are increasingly able to innovate in different regions of the world. They can arbitrage ideas between different cultures by understanding how those cultures connect.
The second reason is that in field after field, our basic understanding of the world is reaching a point of saturation. We have a pretty good understanding of the individual components of the world. In the near future, the chances of making a radical discovery are slim. So the emphasis will be less on understanding each component and more on how those components interact.
Last but not the least, computing power has been doubling every eighteen months and continues to do so. This exponential leap in computation will generate more intersections for two reasons. First, it will not merely let us do the same things faster (which enables directional innovation). It will also allow us to do different things, generating possible intersections between traditionally separate fields. The leap in computation has also led to advances in communication, making our world smaller. Individuals, groups, and organizations that were once separate can now easily come together to find intersections between their backgrounds and expertise.
Read this fascinating book to know more about intersectional innovations.
Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts & Cultures
Frans Johansson
Harvard Business School Press, 2004
This fascinating book tells us about working at the intersection of different fields to generate and implement creative ideas. Opportunities to innovate may be limited within a field. But they multiply when different fields are combined. That is the key message in this book.
The key difference between a field and an intersection of fields lies in how concepts within them are combined. When we operate within a field, we can combine concepts within that particular field, generating ideas that evolve along a particular direction. The author calls them directional ideas. When we work at the intersection, we combine concepts between multiple fields, generating ideas that leap in new directions. The author calls them intersectional ideas.
Directional innovation improves a product in fairly predictable steps, along a well-defined dimension. The goal is to evolve an established idea by using refinements and adjustments. The rewards are reasonably predictable and attained without a long gestation period.
Intersectional innovations, on the other hand, pave the way for a new field. They often make it possible for the people who originated them to become the leaders in the fields they created. Intersectional innovations do not require as much depth of expertise as directional innovation and can be executed by seemingly ordinary people.
For most of us, the best chance to innovate lies at the intersection. Not only is the probability of finding remarkable idea combinations greater there, we will also find many more of them.
There are three distinct forces behind the rise of intersections.
The movement of people is on the rise everywhere. This is facilitating cultural intersections in fields such as cinema, literature, music, and art. Businesses, too, are increasingly able to innovate in different regions of the world. They can arbitrage ideas between different cultures by understanding how those cultures connect.
The second reason is that in field after field, our basic understanding of the world is reaching a point of saturation. We have a pretty good understanding of the individual components of the world. In the near future, the chances of making a radical discovery are slim. So the emphasis will be less on understanding each component and more on how those components interact.
Last but not the least, computing power has been doubling every eighteen months and continues to do so. This exponential leap in computation will generate more intersections for two reasons. First, it will not merely let us do the same things faster (which enables directional innovation). It will also allow us to do different things, generating possible intersections between traditionally separate fields. The leap in computation has also led to advances in communication, making our world smaller. Individuals, groups, and organizations that were once separate can now easily come together to find intersections between their backgrounds and expertise.
Read this fascinating book to know more about intersectional innovations.
CREATIVITY
CREATIVITY - Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
This fascinating book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi brings out the importance of creativity, outlines its building blocks and explains how we can all become more creative.
Without creativity, it would be difficult to distinguish humans from other animals. Creativity leads to a fuller, more satisfying life. Without creativity, mankind would not progress.
Csikszentmihalyi points out that creativity cannot be understood by looking only at the people who appear to make it happen. Creative ideas need a receptive audience to record and implement them. And without the assessment of competent outsiders, we cannot decide whether the claims of a self-styled creative person are valid.
Creativity results from the interaction of a system consisting of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation.
Creativity is the process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is changed. So we must learn the domain well. To master a domain, we must pay attention to the information to be assimilated. Bulk of our attention is committed to the tasks of surviving from one day to the next. And we do not do much with the small amount of attention left over because of the lack of focus. Diffused thinking leads to lack of concentration. Creativity is possible only when we are able to focus attention on the problem at hand.
Creativity, as mentioned before, consists of three main parts. The first of these is the domain, which consists of a set of symbolic rules and procedures.
The second component of creativity is the field, which includes all the individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain. They decide whether a new idea or product can be accepted. For example, in the visual arts, the field consists of art teachers, curators of museums, collectors of art, critics, and administrators of foundations and government agencies that deal with culture. These people decide what new works of art must be recognised, preserved, and remembered.
The third component is the individual, who using symbols of a given domain, comes up with a new idea or sees a new pattern. His or her thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain.
Read this book to get a deeper understanding of creativity and how creative people go about doing their work and leading their lives.
This fascinating book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi brings out the importance of creativity, outlines its building blocks and explains how we can all become more creative.
Without creativity, it would be difficult to distinguish humans from other animals. Creativity leads to a fuller, more satisfying life. Without creativity, mankind would not progress.
Csikszentmihalyi points out that creativity cannot be understood by looking only at the people who appear to make it happen. Creative ideas need a receptive audience to record and implement them. And without the assessment of competent outsiders, we cannot decide whether the claims of a self-styled creative person are valid.
Creativity results from the interaction of a system consisting of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation.
Creativity is the process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is changed. So we must learn the domain well. To master a domain, we must pay attention to the information to be assimilated. Bulk of our attention is committed to the tasks of surviving from one day to the next. And we do not do much with the small amount of attention left over because of the lack of focus. Diffused thinking leads to lack of concentration. Creativity is possible only when we are able to focus attention on the problem at hand.
Creativity, as mentioned before, consists of three main parts. The first of these is the domain, which consists of a set of symbolic rules and procedures.
The second component of creativity is the field, which includes all the individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain. They decide whether a new idea or product can be accepted. For example, in the visual arts, the field consists of art teachers, curators of museums, collectors of art, critics, and administrators of foundations and government agencies that deal with culture. These people decide what new works of art must be recognised, preserved, and remembered.
The third component is the individual, who using symbols of a given domain, comes up with a new idea or sees a new pattern. His or her thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain.
Read this book to get a deeper understanding of creativity and how creative people go about doing their work and leading their lives.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
The Mystery of Capital
Why does capitalism thrive in the west but not in many developing countries? Global capitalism has been tried before in various parts of the world. In Latin America, for example, reforms have been tried at least four times since independence from Spain in the 1820s. Each time, after the initial euphoria, Latin America swung back from capitalist and market economy policies.
Westerners rationalise these setbacks by blaming people in the poor countries for their lack of entrepreneurial spirit or market orientation. Other popular explanations are lack of Protestant ethic, the legacy of colonialism and low IQ.
According to Hernando De Soto, the major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labour and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one thing that the poor countries of the world cannot seem to produce enough for themselves.
De Soto argues in this seminal book that the poor cannot produce capital not because they do not possess assets. But they hold these assets in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, or unincorporated businesses with undefined liability. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside narrow local circles where people know and trust each other and cannot be used as collateral for a loan.
In the West, by contrast, land, building and equipment are represented in a property document that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational process, land can be used as collateral for raising loans. Third World and former community nations do not have this representational process. The enterprises of the poor are very much like corporations that cannot issue shares or bonds to obtain new investments and finance.
In poor countries, although people frequently break the law, their entrepreneurial ingenuity has created wealth on a vast scale. These assets far exceed the holdings of the government, the local stock exchanges and foreign direct investment. According to the author, the total value of the “illegal” real estate held by the poor of the Third World and former communist nations is at least $9.3 trillion, about twice as much as the total circulating US money supply. But in the absence of a suitable representational process, the value of these assets remains locked up.
Read this great book to know more.
Westerners rationalise these setbacks by blaming people in the poor countries for their lack of entrepreneurial spirit or market orientation. Other popular explanations are lack of Protestant ethic, the legacy of colonialism and low IQ.
According to Hernando De Soto, the major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labour and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one thing that the poor countries of the world cannot seem to produce enough for themselves.
De Soto argues in this seminal book that the poor cannot produce capital not because they do not possess assets. But they hold these assets in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, or unincorporated businesses with undefined liability. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside narrow local circles where people know and trust each other and cannot be used as collateral for a loan.
In the West, by contrast, land, building and equipment are represented in a property document that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational process, land can be used as collateral for raising loans. Third World and former community nations do not have this representational process. The enterprises of the poor are very much like corporations that cannot issue shares or bonds to obtain new investments and finance.
In poor countries, although people frequently break the law, their entrepreneurial ingenuity has created wealth on a vast scale. These assets far exceed the holdings of the government, the local stock exchanges and foreign direct investment. According to the author, the total value of the “illegal” real estate held by the poor of the Third World and former communist nations is at least $9.3 trillion, about twice as much as the total circulating US money supply. But in the absence of a suitable representational process, the value of these assets remains locked up.
Read this great book to know more.
The Wisdom of Crowds
In this best seller, James Surowiecki tell us how we can leverage the collective intelligence of a group of people as opposed to depending heavily on the individual brilliance of one or a few people. Surowiecki also examines situations when the judgment of a crowd can go awry. Many of the principles covered in the book can be used by companies profitably to improve decision making and managerial effectiveness.
Under the right circumstances, groups of people can be remarkably intelligent and often smarter than the smartest people in them. Even if most of the people in a group are not exceptionally well informed, they can still reach a collectively wise decision.The author’s key message is that instead of searching for one or a few experts to solve a problem, it might be better to tap the wisdom of the crowd.
The author deals with three kinds of problems in this book. Cognition problems are those which have definitive solutions. In case of coordination problems people in a group have to coordinate their behavior with each other. Cooperation problems involve getting self interested, distrustful people to work together. The author examines how the wisdom of crowds can be leveraged to deal with each of those problems.
Some real life examples illustrate the wisdom of crowds.We all know how effective the audience poll is in Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC), whereas “phone a friend” often produces the wrong answer. We know this intuitively but more systematic studies have been done in the West. In the popular TV show, “Who wants to be a millionaire?” on which KBC is based, the experts gave the right answer 65% of the time but the audience did so 91% of the time.
The way Google works is also on the basis of the wisdom of crowds. Google is based on an algorithm that attempts to let all the web pages on the Internet decide which pages are relevant to a particular search. Google interprets a link from one page to another as a vote. Votes cast by pages, that are themselves more important, receive more weight.
We can view the stock market as a crowd. When the Space Shuttle, Challenger blew up on January 28, 1986, the stock markets hammered down the price of one of the four contractors involved in the project, Morton Thiokol. No public information was available to indicate that it was indeed this vendor who was the main culprit and not the other three. Yet, six months later, the presidential commission endorsed the view of the market by concluding that it was indeed the O-ring seals supplied by Thiokol that was responsible for the damage. There was no evidence of insider trading, i.e., the crowd did not have access to any privileged information. Yet the crowd had established its wisdom beyond doubt.
A mathematical truism forms the basis for the wisdom of crowds. When a large group of diverse, independent people estimate something, each estimate has two components, the expected value and the error. When the estimates are added, the errors cancel out. That is why when crowds figure out the expected value, the accuracy levels are often high.
A group works effectively because of diversity of opinion, independence (people think independently), decentralization (people draw on locally available knowledge) and aggregation (mechanism for turning private judgments into a collective decision).
At the same time, we must remember that groups work well only under certain circumstances but not under others. They need rules to maintain order and coherence. Communication within the group is important though excessive communication is not desirable. This means that people within the groups must not be able to influence each other too much.
Read this great book to know more.
Under the right circumstances, groups of people can be remarkably intelligent and often smarter than the smartest people in them. Even if most of the people in a group are not exceptionally well informed, they can still reach a collectively wise decision.The author’s key message is that instead of searching for one or a few experts to solve a problem, it might be better to tap the wisdom of the crowd.
The author deals with three kinds of problems in this book. Cognition problems are those which have definitive solutions. In case of coordination problems people in a group have to coordinate their behavior with each other. Cooperation problems involve getting self interested, distrustful people to work together. The author examines how the wisdom of crowds can be leveraged to deal with each of those problems.
Some real life examples illustrate the wisdom of crowds.We all know how effective the audience poll is in Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC), whereas “phone a friend” often produces the wrong answer. We know this intuitively but more systematic studies have been done in the West. In the popular TV show, “Who wants to be a millionaire?” on which KBC is based, the experts gave the right answer 65% of the time but the audience did so 91% of the time.
The way Google works is also on the basis of the wisdom of crowds. Google is based on an algorithm that attempts to let all the web pages on the Internet decide which pages are relevant to a particular search. Google interprets a link from one page to another as a vote. Votes cast by pages, that are themselves more important, receive more weight.
We can view the stock market as a crowd. When the Space Shuttle, Challenger blew up on January 28, 1986, the stock markets hammered down the price of one of the four contractors involved in the project, Morton Thiokol. No public information was available to indicate that it was indeed this vendor who was the main culprit and not the other three. Yet, six months later, the presidential commission endorsed the view of the market by concluding that it was indeed the O-ring seals supplied by Thiokol that was responsible for the damage. There was no evidence of insider trading, i.e., the crowd did not have access to any privileged information. Yet the crowd had established its wisdom beyond doubt.
A mathematical truism forms the basis for the wisdom of crowds. When a large group of diverse, independent people estimate something, each estimate has two components, the expected value and the error. When the estimates are added, the errors cancel out. That is why when crowds figure out the expected value, the accuracy levels are often high.
A group works effectively because of diversity of opinion, independence (people think independently), decentralization (people draw on locally available knowledge) and aggregation (mechanism for turning private judgments into a collective decision).
At the same time, we must remember that groups work well only under certain circumstances but not under others. They need rules to maintain order and coherence. Communication within the group is important though excessive communication is not desirable. This means that people within the groups must not be able to influence each other too much.
Read this great book to know more.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
