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576.    Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, Business, Sociology, Economics, Psychology

454 pages, published May 18, 2021

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In Noise, Economist, Social Scientist and Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, along with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, explore the concept of noise, i.e. why most people make bad judgments, and how to correct for it.​  Noise is the variation in outcomes due to human decision making.  For example, when two different claims adjusters at the same insurance company come to radically different conclusions on the value of the same claim.  While noise contributes to significant errors in a diverse spectrum of fields, the individuals and organizations making decisions are usually unaware of the role played by chance in their judgments and in their actions.

Quotes 

“To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise.”

 

“wherever there is judgment, there is noise—and more of it than you think.”

 

“Bias and noise—systematic deviation and random scatter—are different components of error.”

 

“Judgment can therefore be described as measurement in which the instrument is a human mind.”

 

“There is at least one source of occasion noise that we have all noticed: mood.”

 

“When physicians are under time pressure, they are apparently more inclined to choose a quick-fix solution, despite its serious downsides.”

 

“Averaging two guesses by the same person does not improve judgments as much as does seeking out an independent second opinion. As Vul and Pashler put it, “You can gain about 1/10th as much from asking yourself the same question twice as you can from getting a second opinion from someone else.” This is not a large improvement. But you can make the effect much larger by waiting to make a second guess.”

 

“When Vul and Pashler let three weeks pass before asking their subjects the same question again, the benefit rose to one-third the value of a second opinion.”

 

 “Herzog and Hertwig then averaged the two estimates thus produced. Their technique, which they named dialectical bootstrapping, produced larger improvements in accuracy than did a simple request for a second estimate immediately following the first. Because the participants forced themselves to consider the question in a new light, they sampled another, more different version of themselves—two “members” of the “crowd within” who were further apart. As a result, their average produced a more accurate estimate of the truth. The gain in accuracy with two immediately consecutive “dialectical” estimates was about half the value of a second opinion.”

 

 “A study of thousands of juvenile court decisions found that when the local football team loses a game on the weekend, the judges make harsher decisions on the Monday (and, to a lesser extent, for the rest of the week). Black defendants disproportionately bear the brunt of that increased harshness. A different study looked at 1.5 million judicial decisions over three decades and similarly found that judges are more severe on days that follow a loss by the local city’s football team than they are on days that follow a win.”

 

 “Vul and Pashler drew inspiration from the well-known phenomenon known as the wisdom-of-crowds effect: averaging the independent judgments of different people generally improves accuracy. In 1907, Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin and a famous polymath, asked 787 villagers at a country fair to estimate the weight of a prize ox. None of the villagers guessed the actual weight of the ox, which was 1,198 pounds, but the mean of their guesses was 1,200, just 2 pounds off, and the median (1,207) was also very close. The villagers were a “wise crowd” in the sense that although their individual estimates were quite noisy, they were unbiased. Galton’s demonstration surprised him: he had little respect for the judgment of ordinary people, and despite himself, he urged that his results were “more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected.”

 

“Most organizations prefer consensus and harmony over dissent and conflict. The procedures in place often seem expressly designed to minimize the frequency of exposure to actual disagreements and, when such disagreements happen, to explain them away.”

 

“Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off target. Other judgments are noisy, as people who are expected to agree end up at very different points around the target. Many organizations, unfortunately, are afflicted by both bias and noise.”

 

“In a negotiation situation, for instance, good mood helps. People in a good mood are more cooperative and elicit reciprocation. They tend to end up with better results than do unhappy negotiators.”

 

“On the other hand, a good mood makes us more likely to accept our first impressions as true without challenging them.”

 

“As you can guess, this is a test of the readers’ vulnerability to stereotypes: do people rate the essay more favorably when it is attributed to a middle-aged man than they do when they believe that a young woman wrote it? They do, of course. But importantly, the difference is larger in the good-mood condition. People who are in a good mood are more likely to let their biases affect their thinking.”

 

“Inducing good moods makes people more receptive to bullshit and more gullible in general; they are less apt to detect deception or identify misleading information. Conversely, eyewitnesses who are exposed to misleading information are better able to disregard it—and to avoid false testimony—when they are in a bad mood.”

 

“However, when the subjects were placed in a positive mood—induced by watching a five-minute video segment—they became three times more likely to say that they would push the man off the bridge. Whether we regard “Thou shalt not kill” as an absolute principle or are willing to kill one stranger to save five should reflect our deepest values. Yet our choice seems to depend on what video clip we have just watched.”

 

“A study of nearly seven hundred thousand primary care visits, for instance, showed that physicians are significantly more likely to prescribe opioids at the end of a long day.”

 

My Take

While Noise is a bit on the dense side, it did introduce me to some new concepts and change the way I look at the world.  For a non-fiction book, that is high praise.

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561. Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bill Perkins

Genre:   Non Fiction, Personal Finance, Happiness, Self Improvement, Business, Psychology, Economics

240 pages, published July 28, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The premise of Die with Zero is that too many people save all of their lives for their retirement and that by the time they retire they can’t enjoy their money.  Instead, author Bill Perkins advocates a different approach to spending where you can maximize your enjoyment of your money throughout your life.

Quotes 

“At the high end, retirees who had $500,000 or more right before retirement had spent down a median of only 11.8 percent of that money 20 years later or by the time they died. That’s more than 88 percent left over—which means that a person retiring at 65 with half a million dollars still has more than $440,000 left at age 85! At the lower end, retirees with less than $200,000 saved up for retirement spent a higher percentage (as you might expect, since they had less to spend overall)—but even this group’s median members had spent down only one-quarter of their assets 18 years after retirement.”

 

“You might think that as people get older, they spend money more freely out of the sheer desire to make the most of it before it’s truly too late. But the opposite tends to happen. In general, spending among American households declines as people age. For example, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that in 2017, average annual spending for households headed by 55-to-64-year-olds was $65,000; average spending fell to $55,000 for those between 65 and 74; and spending fell again to $42,000 for those 75 and older. This overall decline occurred despite a rise in healthcare expenses, because most other expenses, such as clothing and entertainment, were much lower. The decline in spending over time was even more acute for retirees with more than $1 million in assets, according to separate research conducted by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which analyzed data from more than half a million of its customers.”

 

“The insurance companies that create annuities often make them seem like investments,” he wrote in a recent explainer about annuities. “But really they’re more like insurance.” Lieber went on: “Like insurance to stave off financial disaster, an annuity is something you purchase to guarantee that you won’t run out of money if you live a long time.” In fact, thinking of annuities as insurance makes them a lot more sensible than thinking of them as investments—because as investments they are not good at all. But that’s not their goal—their goal is to insure you against the risk of outliving your money.”

 

“It’s called consumption smoothing. Our incomes might vary from one month or one year to another, but that doesn’t mean our spending should reflect those variations—we would be better off if we evened out those variations. To do that, we need to basically transfer money from years of abundance into the leaner years. That’s one use of savings accounts. But in my case, I had been using my savings account totally backwards—I was taking money away from my starving younger self to give to my future wealthier self! No wonder Joe called me an idiot.”

 

 

My Take

Die with Zero met one of my basic criteria for a non-fiction book, e.g. it made me think about things in a new way.  My husband Scot and I retired in 2020 (after several years of tapering off) in our early and mid 50’s and have already adopted a lot of the ideas Perkins advocates.  We are spending a lot of money on travel to experience as much of the world as possible before we are too old and/or infirm to do so.  We also plan to use our money to help our kids while we are still alive and it will have the most benefit. We don’t plan to “die with zero,” but we do plan to maximize our enjoyment of life while we can.

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509. Tax-Free Wealth, 2nd Edition: How to Build Massive Wealth by Permanently Lowering Your Taxes

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tom Wheelwright

Genre:  Non Fiction, Business, Self Improvement

282 pages, published April 2, 2019

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Tax-Free Wealth is about tax planning concepts and how to use tax laws to your benefit. Author Tom Wheelwright explains how the tax laws work and how they are designed to reduce you taxes, not to increase them, as long as you do things the government wants you to like start a business or own real estate.

Quotes 

“The hardest thing in the world to understand is income taxes. – Albert Einstein”

“TAX TIP: Put your family to work. Make your business a family business. Then when you travel for business, your family’s travel is deductible. And you can shift income from your higher tax bracket to their lower tax bracket. This creates permanent tax savings.”

 

My Take

As an inveterate optimizer, I am always looking for ways to lower our taxes.  However, since my husband and I have both recently retired, a lot of this book (which is geared toward business owners) is not applicable to us.  But I did pick up some useful tips on real estate depreciation that I plan to use when we buy a beach house rental in the next few years.

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500. Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Don A. Moore

Genre:    Non Fiction, Self Improvement, Psychology, Business

272  pages, published  May 5, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Perfectly Confident is written by Don Moore, an expert on the psychology of decision making at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and examines the importance of confidence while also assessing the harm from underconfidence and overconfidence.  Moore identifies the ways confidence behaves in real life and advises the reader on how to achieve the appropriate level of confidence.

Quotes 

“Ways that psychology research demonstrates we are often overconfident in the decisions we make:

Overestimation – thinking that you are better, faster, or more likely to succeed than you are

Overplacement – the exaggerated belief that you are better than others

Overpercision – excessive faith that you have the right answer.”

 

“Thinking probabilistically, view the future in probabilities and distributions of outcomes as opposed to one specific outcome.”

 

“Ask yourself: WHAT ARE YOU WRONG ABOUT RIGHT NOW?  Calibrating your confidence includes appreciating all the reasons why you might be wrong. Some of the things you currently believe now are WRONG.”

 

“Don’t fall prey to “resulting,” don’t view outcomes as inevitable.”

 

“Why you should start thinking in “expected value.”

 

“Fooling yourself into being more confident can lead you to take risks that may not turn out well. “

 

“Powerful leaders are willing to admit ignorance and bring people to the table who will raise difficult questions.”

 

“Consider thinking of the downside and use a pre-mortem to understand why things have gone horribly awry.”

 

“Capitalize on disagreement. Rather than avoiding or hiding disagreement, try to pull it out to the forefront.”

 

“Ask yourself – what does the other person know that you don’t?”

 

“wisdom is the tolerance for cognitive dissonance.”

 

My Take

While there are a few interesting ideas in Perfectly Confident, on the whole I found it to be a dense read that is better suited to management professionals rather than the average person.  Not many takeaways for improving your confidence or your life.

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495. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

  1. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Daniel H. Pink

Genre:   Non Fiction, Psychology, Business, Self Improvement

242  pages, published  December 29, 2009

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In Drive, Author Daniel Pinkwater explores the question of motivation.  He demonstrates that money is not always the best method.  Rather, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Quotes 

“Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”

 

 “Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.”

 

“Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.”

 

“The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.”   TOM KELLEY General Manager, IDEO”

 

“The monkeys solved the puzzle simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward.”

 

“While complying can be an effective strategy for physical survival, it’s a lousy one for personal fulfillment. Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in

control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement. The former might get you through the day, but only the latter will get you through the night.”

 

“I say, ‘Get me some poets as managers.’ Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world runs. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow’s new business leaders.”  –Sidney Harman, CEO Multimillionaire of a stereo components company”

 

“People can have two different mindsets, she says. Those with a “fixed mindset” believe that their talents and abilities are carved in stone. Those with a “growth mindset” believe that their talents and abilities can be developed. Fixed mindsets see every encounter as a test of their worthiness. Growth mindsets see the same encounters as opportunities to improve.”

 

“As Carol Dweck says, “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and commit yourself to working toward them.”

 

“The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road. Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that have seemed endemic to modern life involve shortcuts.”

 

“One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom. But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow.”

 

“we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy.”

 

“Children who are praised for “being smart” often believe that every encounter is a test of whether they really are. So to avoid looking dumb, they resist new challenges and choose the easiest path. By contrast, kids who understand that effort and hard work lead to mastery and growth are more willing to take on new, difficult tasks.”

 

“coffee-then-nap combination known as the “nappuccino.”

 

“When the reward is the activity itself–deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best–there are no shortcuts.”

 

“Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices,” he told me. It’s about creating conditions for people to do their best work.”

 

“Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others–sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on–can sometimes have dangerous side effects.”

 

“We leave lucrative jobs to take low-paying ones that provide a clearer sense of purpose.”

 

“For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation—the drive do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing—is essential for high levels of creativity.”

 

My Take

I found Drive  to be an engaging book that gave me a lot to think about.  Author Daniel Pink is spot on when he observes that money only partially motivates human beings.  Instead, we need to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another to put forward our best efforts and do our best work.  I saw this firsthand with my kids.  My husband and I did not closely monitor their schoolwork.  Rather, we set high expectations, talked often about the importance of doing their best, explained the real world consequences of poor or exemplary performance and left the rest to them.  Over time, they both became internally motivated and achieved impressive results.

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486. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   J.D. Roth

Author:   Greg McKeown

Genre:   Non Fiction, Self Improvement, Business, Philosophy

260  pages, published April 14, 2014

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The theme of Essentialism is that your life can be markedly improved if you focus on the things that are truly important to you and cut out the superfluous.  Author Greg McKeown advocates the Way of the Essentialist which isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done.  It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so that we only focus on the things that really matter.

Quotes 

“Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life someone else will.”

 

“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”

 

“Weniger aber besser. The English translation is: Less but better.”

 

“The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.”

 

“If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no.”

 

“Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”

 

“What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?”

 

“The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.”

 

“Today, technology has lowered the barrier for others to share their opinion about what we should be focusing on. It is not just information overload; it is opinion overload.”

 

“Essentialists see trade-offs as an inherent part of life, not as an inherently negative part of life. Instead of asking, “What do I have to give up?” they ask, “What do I want to go big on?”

 

“We overvalue nonessentials like a nicer car or house, or even intangibles like the number of our followers on Twitter or the way we look in our Facebook photos. As a result, we neglect activities that are truly essential, like spending time with our loved ones, or nurturing our spirit, or taking care of our health.”

 

“We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.”

 

“Sleep will enhance your ability to explore, make connections, and do less but better throughout your waking hours.”

 

“the killer question: “If I didn’t already own this, how much would I spend to buy it?”

 

My Take

In Essentialism, Author Greg McKeown makes a strong case for the benefit of focusing only on the essential things in your life and eliminating the trivial, superficial and things that are unimportant to you.  By doing so, we can lead a more meaningful life on our own terms.  The book also contains a lot of practical advice (e.g. how to say no tactfully) that I appreciated.

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481. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Deidre Farrell

Author:   Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

Genre:   Nonfiction, Business

464 pages, published September 8, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In No Rules Rules, Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings and business writer Erin Meyer explore the unique culture behind one of the world’s most innovative and successful companies.  Launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, Netflix has reinvented itself multiple times. Along the way, the company adopted several counterintuitive, radical management principles. Hastings built a corporate culture focused on freedom, responsibility and innovation.  At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies, pay is overmarket with no bonuses, adequate performance gets a generous severance, hard work is irrelevant, you don’t try to please your boss, but give candid feedback instead.

Quotes 

“The Fearless Organization, she explains that if you want to encourage innovation, you should develop an environment where people feel safe to dream, speak up, and take risks. The safer the atmosphere, the more innovation you will have.”

 

“A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call “stunning colleagues”—highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively. What’s more, none of the other principles can work unless you have ensured this first dot is in place.”

 

“even when other team members were exceptionally talented and intelligent, one individual’s bad behavior brought down the effectiveness of the entire team. In dozens of trials, conducted over month-long periods, groups with one underperformer did worse than other teams by a whopping 30 to 40 percent.”

 

“it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.”

 

“A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call “stunning colleagues”—highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively.”

 

“Humility is important in a leader and role model. When you succeed, speak about it softly or let others mention it for you. But when you make a mistake say it clearly and loudly, so that everyone can learn and profit from your errors. In other words, “Whisper wins and shout mistakes.”

 

“If you have a team of five stunning employees and two adequate ones, the adequate ones will sap managers’ energy, so they have less time for the top performers, reduce the quality of group discussions, lowering the team’s overall IQ, force others to develop ways to work around them, reducing efficiency, drive staff who seek excellence to quit, and show the team you accept mediocrity, thus multiplying the problem.”

 

“TALENT DENSITY: TALENTED PEOPLE MAKE ONE ANOTHER MORE EFFECTIVE”

 

“I recommend instead focusing first on something much more difficult: getting employees to give candid feedback to the boss. This can be accompanied by boss-to-employee feedback. But it’s when employees begin providing truthful feedback to their leaders that the big benefits of candor really take off.”

 

“Steve Jobs said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

 

“Only say about someone what you will say to their face.”

 

“TELL THE EMPEROR WHEN HE HAS NO CLOTHES…The higher you get in an organization, the less feedback you receive, and the more likely you are to ‘come to work naked’ or make another error that’s obvious to everyone but you.”

 

“My performance would ultimately be judged, not on whether any individual bet failed, but on my overall ability to use those chips to move the business forward. Jack made it clear that at Netflix you don’t lose your job because you make a bet that doesn’t work out. Instead you lose your job for not using your chips to make big things happen or for showing consistently poor judgment over time.”

 

My Take

Surprisingly for a business book, No Rules Rules was a captivating read.  The dynamic, unique culture (which focuses on empowering individual employees) at Netflix is very different from mainstream corporate America, but it works.  This book was a page turner and I highly recommend it.

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472. The Ascent of Money

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Niall Ferguson

Genre:   Non Fiction, Economics, History, Business, Finance

442 pages, published November 13, 2008

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

In The Ascent of Money, Scottish historian Niall Ferguson writes about the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to its recent impact on our modern world.   Ferguson demonstrates that finance is the foundation of human progress and that financial history underlies all human history. He specifically looks at the following questions:  What is money? What do banks do? What’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do?

Quotes 

“The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.”

 

“Money, it is conventional to argue, is a medium of exchange, which has the advantage of eliminating inefficiencies of barter; a unit of account, which facilitates valuation and calculation; and a store of value, which allows economic transactions to be conducted over long periods as well as geographical distances. To perform all these functions optimally, money has to be available, affordable, durable, fungible, portable and reliable.”

 

“there really is no such thing as ‘the future’, singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise.”

 

“only when savers can put their money in reliable banks that it can be channelled from the idle to the industrious.”

 

“poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channeled from the idle rich to the industrious poor.”

 

“perennial truths of financial history. Sooner or later every bubble bursts. Sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers. Sooner or later greed turns to fear.”

 

“The subprime butterfly had flapped its wings and triggered a global hurricane.”

 

My Take

While there are some interesting ideas and food for thought in The Ascent of Money, it is too long and would benefit tremendously from some heavy editing.

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444. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Chris Voss

Genre:   Non Fiction, Psychology, Self Improvement, Business

274 pages, published May 17, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

Chris Voss, a former hostage negotiator for the FBI, explains his approach to negotiating.  He takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations, discussing the skills that helped him to save lives and applies them to a variety of real life situations.

Quotes 

“He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”

 

“Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you.”

 

“If you approach a negotiation thinking the other guy thinks like you, you are wrong. That’s not empathy, that’s a projection.”

 

“The fastest and most efficient means of establishing a quick working relationship is to acknowledge the negative and diffuse it.”

 

“The positive/playful voice: Should be your default voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking.”

 

“Though the intensity may differ from person to person, you can be sure that everyone you meet is driven by two primal urges: the need to feel safe and secure, and the need to feel in control. If you satisfy those drives, you’re in the door.”

 

“Another simple rule is, when you are verbally assaulted, do not counterattack. Instead, disarm your counterpart by asking a calibrated question.”

 

“Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts.”

 

“Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings.”

 

“The beauty of empathy is that it doesn’t demand that you agree with the other person’s ideas.”

 

“ Identify your counterpart’s negotiating style. Once you know whether they are Accommodator, Assertive, or Analyst, you’ll know the correct way to approach them.   Prepare, prepare, prepare. When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion; you fall to your highest level of preparation. So design an ambitious but legitimate goal and then game out the labels, calibrated questions, and responses you’ll use to get there. That way, once you’re at the bargaining table, you won’t have to wing it.  Get ready to take a punch. Kick-ass negotiators usually lead with an extreme anchor to knock you off your game. If you’re not ready, you’ll flee to your maximum without a fight. So prepare your dodging tactics to avoid getting sucked into the compromise trap.   Set boundaries, and learn to take a punch or punch back, without anger. The guy across the table is not the problem; the situation is.  Prepare an Ackerman plan. Before you head into the weeds of bargaining, you’ll need a plan of extreme anchor, calibrated questions, and well-defined offers. Remember: 65, 85, 95, 100 percent. Decreasing raises and ending on nonround numbers will get your counterpart to believe that he’s squeezing you for all you’re worth when you’re really getting to the number you want.”

 

“What does a good babysitter sell, really? It’s not child care exactly, but a relaxed evening. A furnace salesperson? Cozy rooms for family time. A locksmith? A feeling of security. Know the emotional drivers and you can frame the benefits of any deal in language that will resonate.”

 

“Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible.”

 

“It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.”

 

“The last rule of labeling is silence. Once you’ve thrown out a label, be quiet and listen.”

 

“First, let’s talk a little human psychology. In basic terms, people’s emotions have two levels: the “presenting” behavior is the part above the surface you can see and hear; beneath, the “underlying” feeling is what motivates the behavior. Imagine a grandfather who’s grumbly at a family holiday dinner: the presenting behavior is that he’s cranky, but the underlying emotion is a sad sense of loneliness from his family never seeing him. What good negotiators do when labeling is address those underlying emotions. Labeling negatives diffuses them (or defuses them, in extreme cases); labeling positives reinforces them.”

 

“This really juices their self-esteem. Researchers have found that people getting concessions often feel better about the bargaining process than those who are given a single firm, “fair” offer. In fact, they feel better even when they end up paying more—or receiving less—than they otherwise might.”

 

“A good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find. Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously. People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible. To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built. Put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart.”

 

“The Rule of Three is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation. It’s tripling the strength of whatever dynamic you’re trying to drill into at the moment. In doing so, it uncovers problems before they happen. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction.”

 

“Mirrors work magic. Repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. Mirroring is the art of insinuating similarity, which facilitates bonding. Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.”

 

“By repeating back what people say, you trigger this mirroring instinct and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was just said and sustain the process of connecting.”

 

“Creating unconditional positive regard opens the door to changing thoughts and behaviors. Humans have an innate urge toward socially constructive behavior. The more a person feels understood, and positively affirmed in that understanding, the more likely that urge for constructive behavior will take hold. “That’s right” is better than “yes.” Strive for it. Reaching “that’s right” in a negotiation creates breakthroughs. Use a summary to trigger a “that’s right.” The building blocks of a good summary are a label combined with paraphrasing. Identify, rearticulate, and emotionally affirm.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Getting to Yes: Negotiating an Agreement Without Giving In, another book on negotiating, but prefer the ideas in Never Split the Difference.  Author Chris Voss provides lots of detailed instructions and ideas on how to get the result you want in any negotiation.

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440. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Epstein

Genre:   Nonfiction, Business, Psychology, Self Improvement, Science

352 pages, published May 28, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Range, author David Epstein takes on the accepted wisdom that the key to success in most fields involves singular focus from a young age combined with thousands of hours of deliberate practice, i.e. the 10,000 hour rule immortalized in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  Think Tiger Woods or Mozart.  Epstein takes a contrarian view and explores the view that the most effective path to success is to dabble and/or delay.  He looks at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, and shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. Inventors who cross domains and engage in multiple disciplines have the greatest impact.  Range makes the case that failing is the best way to learn and shows that frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers.

Quotes 

“We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

 

“If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly.”

 

“Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones.  Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.”

 

“Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures.”

 

“Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.”

 

“You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”

 

“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”

 

“The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose.”

 

“breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.”

 

“Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.”

 

“While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”

 

“First act and then think…We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

 

“A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers. To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.”

 

My Take

I enjoy reading books that challenge long held assumptions and Range falls squarely into that camp.  I have long believed the conventional wisdom that early focus, repetitive practice and hyper specialization were the road to success.  However, author David Epstein makes a compelling case, backed up with data, that the road to greatness is often a meandering one, with failure, course changes and a broad range of interdisciplinary influences rating as essential elements.  In reading this book, I was reminded of Leonardo da Vinci, the biography of the iconic artist and inventor who drew on a wide range of influences for some of his most creative and groundbreaking work.

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