A friend recently shared his old Yale professor’s approach to efficiently tackling books, which goes something like this: read the table of contents and introduction; the first and last chapters; the index, noting and researching the most cited topics; the table of contents again; then the first and last paragraph of all the remaining chapters. Got it? The professor’s point was one can absorb nearly every important concept in a book…
Book Review – The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
You were born an entrepreneur. So starts this month’s book selection, “The Start-up of You” by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha. Hoffman, the cofounder and chairman of LinkedIn turned venture capitalist, knows a thing or two about starting companies and he’s careful to point out that not everyone is destined to follow his lead in that regard. His point is that we are all born…
Book Review – Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Are you making good decisions these days? Perhaps you read last month’s selection, “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely, and have made positive changes in your day-to-day decision making. Perhaps not, especially if your to-do list includes “read books on decision making” and you haven’t gotten around to that yet! If “Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” is on your current to-do…
Book Review – Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
Last month, our focus was on “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, in which the author described our automatic vs. effortful ways of thinking. This month, we look at being “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely. Ariely zeroes in on “The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” and he does so with hit-and-miss results. On the plus side, the author and his fellow academics…
Book Review – Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Good news, fellow readers: According to recent studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor, business people who read at least seven business books per year earn over 2.3 times more money than those who only read one per year. Why? Because of the constant flow of new ideas and strategies, of course! Last month, the topic was thinking differently with Gregory Berns’ “Iconoclast“; this month we tackle…