The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 26 Aug 2011 07:14 PM PDT Bingsop's Fables: Little Morals for Big Business Author: Stanley Bing Publisher: Harper Business A middle-aged Mogul, whose hair had begun to turn rather sparse in inverse proportion to his girth, found himself pursuing two supermodels at the same time. One of them was obsessed with youth, which she was then on the point of losing. The other was obsessed with food, which she was not permitted to eat. The latter got her vicarious thrills by making sure the Mogul ingested all that she could not eat, while the former, terrified of going grey, removed every one she could find on him. Between them, he soon found himself fat, bald and alone. Using much illustrations, the author uses wit and insight in his white-collar fables passed down from generations since Greece was glorious and Rome was grand. How to Click with People: The secret to better relationships in business and in life Author: Rick Kirschner Publisher: Hyperion WITH some people, you just click. The connection is quick and easy. Communication flows. You can tell them anything and they just know what you mean. We think this connection is an instantaneous thing. Not so, says the author. These skills have to be learned and he relates how you can speak the same language as the other person you are taking to, whether emotional or intellectual. He also writes about our responses to others and highlights the obstacles that get in the way of how we connect with people. Leadership is Dead: How influence is reviving it Author: Jeremie Kubicek Publisher: Howard Books THE author is of the view that good leadership is all about relationships. In order to become trustworthy, one must first of all give trust. In order to be credible, one must not just be smart but be honest and show integrity. These qualities are important because in order to have opportunities, one must first of all pursue relationship ahead of monetary goals. In order to get, one has to first of all, give of oneself. |
| Nothing obvious about the common sense Posted: 26 Aug 2011 07:12 PM PDT Title: Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer – How Common Sense Fails Us Author: Duncan J. Watts Publisher: Crown Business THE French philosopher and writer, Voltaire once said, "Common sense is not so common." You may not think this is such a bad thing after all once you have read Duncan J. Watts' book, Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer – How Common Sense Fails Us. Watts is a professor of sociology at Columbia University and a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research.He provides many thought provoking insights into why the explanations we observe in life – explanations that seem obvious once we know the answer – are less useful than they seem. For instance, how were the fortunes of the Hush Puppies shoe brand revived? Why did Facebook succeed when other social networking sites failed? Watts informs us that a few special people revived the fortunes of the Hush Puppies brand because they started buying Hush Puppies before everyone else did. These statements may be true but what they are really telling us is that what we know happened, happened, and not something else. As these statements can only be constructed after we know the outcomes, we can never be sure how much these explanations really explain, versus simply describe. For example, when Facebook first became popular, conventional wisdom held that its success lay in its exclusivity to college students. Yet by 2009, long after Facebook had opened itself up to everyone, a report by Nielsen, the ratings company, attributed its success to its broad appeal, its "simple design" and "focus on connecting." Facebook, in other words, was successful because it had exactly the attributes of Facebook, even as the attributes themselves changed completely. As a sociologist, Watts has been often asked by sceptics what sociology has to say about the world that an intelligent person could not have figured out on their own. It is a reasonable question, but as the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld pointed out nearly sixty years ago, this also reveals a common misconception about social science. Lazarsfeld was writing about The American Soldier, a then-recently published study of more than 600,000 servicemen that had been conducted by the research branch of the war department during and immediately after the Second World War. To make his point, Lazarsfeld listed six findings from the study that he claimed were representative of the report. For example, number two was that, "Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their army life than soldiers from city backgrounds." "Aha," I hear you say, "that makes perfect sense. Rural men in the 1940s were more accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labour than city men, so naturally they had an easier time adjusting. Why did we need such a vast and expensive study to tell me what I could have figured out on my own?" However, Lazarsfeld surprised his audience by revealing that all six of the "findings" were in fact the opposite of what the study actually found. It was in fact city men, not rural men, who were happier during their army life. However, had the readers been told the real answers in the first place, they could have easily reconciled them with other things they thought they already knew, "City men are more used to working in crowded conditions and in corporations, with chains of command, strict standards of clothing and social etiquette, and so on. That's obvious!" The point Lazarsfeld was trying to make is that when every answer and its opposite answer appears equally obvious, then "something is wrong with the entire argument of "obviousness." Whilst Lazarsfeld was talking about social science, Watts argues in his book that Lazarsfeld's point is equally relevant to any activity – whether politics, philanthropy, management, marketing – that involves understanding, predicting, changing, or responding to the behaviour of people. Watts notes that politicians trying to decide how to deal with urban poverty oftentimes already feel they have a pretty good idea why people are poor. Policy makers empowered to enact sweeping plans that will affect millions of people are no less tempted to trust their intuition about the causes of poverty than ordinary citizens reading the newspaper. Marketers planning an advertising campaign already feel that they have a decent sense of what consumers want and how to make them want more of it. Those designing new schemes to drive down healthcare costs or to improve teaching quality in public schools or to reduce smoking, or to improve energy conservation already feel they can do a reasonable job of getting the incentives right. People generally feel that the problems are mostly within their ability to solve i.e. that "it's not rocket science." Sadly, as Watts points out, we are actually "much better at planning the flight path of an interplanetary rocket than we are at managing the economy, merging two corporations, or predicting anything that involves human behaviour." So, "why is it that rocket science seems hard, whereas problems to do with people – which are arguably much harder – seem like they ought to be a matter of common sense? In his book, Watts argues that the key to the paradox is common sense itself. He shows us many glaring examples from history, from the managing of economies to the understanding riot mentalities, which suggest that when common sense is used for purposes beyond the everyday, it can sometimes fail spectacularly. Criticising common sense is tricky as it is universally regarded as a good thing – when was the last time you were told not to use it? Watts tells us that it is "exquisitely adapted to handling the kind of complexity that arises in everyday situations but matters that involve corporations, cultures, markets, nation states and global institutions exhibit a different kind of complexity from everyday situations. Under those complex circumstances, common sense can suffer from a number of errors that systematically mislead us." As we learn from experience, the failings of common sense reasoning are rarely apparent to us. They tend to manifest themselves as "things we did not know at that time" but which seem obvious in hindsight. The book points out that "the paradox of common sense, therefore, is that even as it helps us to make sense of the world, it can actively undermine our ability to understand it." As human beings, we are more willing to believe that others have misguided beliefs about the world than that our own beliefs are misguided. However, the uncomfortable reality is that what applies to "everyone else" must necessarily apply to us. Whilst we should not abandon all our deeply held beliefs, Watts shows us that we must at least be brave enough to hold them up to a spotlight and regard them with some suspicion. However, even if we do not, the mere exercise of challenging them should at least force us to sit up and take notice of our stubbornness, which in turn should give us pause. Watts sums up the book's purpose well, "(Sociology) means learning to question precisely your instincts about how things work, and possibly to unlearn them altogether. So, if reading this book only confirms what you already thought you knew about the world, then I apologise. As a sociologist, I will not have done my job." |
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