Ford Library Blog

The Director’s Picks

Fuqua School Dean Blair Sheppard asked Ford Library Director, Meg Trauner to select 5 recent business books that should “be on his nightstand”.

Click the titles below for information on location and availability.

• The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria
  - Optimistic view of a world no longer dominated by the U.S.
  - Also available as an audiobook.
• What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis
  - Control is out. Connection is in.
  - Also available as an audiobook.
  - Read the full review.
• How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
  - Based on new research in neuroscience.
  - Read the full review.
• Imagining India: the idea of a renewed nation by Nandan Nilekani
  - Cultural intelligence on how India operates.
• Fool’s Gold: How the bold dream of a small tribe at J.P. Morgan was corrupted by Wall Street greed and unleashed a catastrophe by Gillian Tett
  - Gripping narrative and education on derivatives.
  - Read the full review.

Lehrer, Jonah. How we decide. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

For 35 years, my father designed and tested truck transmissions. Late in his career, his company sent him worldwide to analyze problems for customers. Sometimes he could pinpoint the problem after listening to the engine for several minutes. He always considered himself totally rational and would have denied that emotion could have played a part in his diagnostic skill.

How We Decide is about the recent discoveries in neuroscience that explain how decisions are made. Early cognitive science described the mind as operating in a deliberate and rational manner. Yet the mind is composed of a network of different areas, many of which are involved with the production of emotion. When someone makes a decision, emotional impulses influence judgment, no matter how carefully the pros and cons have been weighed. (more…)

Brafman, Ori and Rom Brafman. Sway: the irresistible pull of irrational behavior. Doubleday, 2008.

Thaler, Richard H. and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness. Yale, 2008.

Most people consider themselves to be rational. They evaluate their options and make decisions rationally, or at least they think so. Recently, a number of books have been published that show that people routinely make bad decisions because they are not paying attention; because they are influenced by their emotions and expectations; because they are pressured by social norms; or because they have limited self control.

The most popular and well-regarded of these books is the best-selling Predictably Irrational by Fuqua faculty member Dan Ariely. Predictably Irrational is a fantastic book that has been reviewed extensively, including reviews in the New York Times and on NPR.

Predictably Irrational is the first go-to source in learning why and how people behave as they do. But two other new books also merit mention:
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How to negotiate anything with anyone anywhere around the world by Frank L. Acuff, Amacom, 3rd ed., 2008.

After a brief discussion of the basics of negotiation, this book discusses how to greet, communicate and negotiate with people in 62 countries worldwide. This book also includes a brief summary of the business climate in 7 regions of the world.

Global negotiation : the new rules by William Hernandez Requejo and John L. Graham, Palgrave, 2008.

In this practical book, Requejo and Graham lay the groundwork for sustainable business relationships worldwide. The first part of this book discusses the multiple ways cultural differences in values and communication styles can cause misunderstandings between otherwise positively disposed business partners. The authors then discuss their model of global negotiation that includes intelligence gathering, communication and creativity. The last part of the book focuses on Indian, Chinese and Mexican negotiation styles.

© Reviewer: Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business. All rights reserved.

Even during summer break Ford Library keeps adding new books to our collection. Come check out our New Book and New Audiobook sections for even more great choices. (Click on any of the titles below to check availability or to place a hold.)

Fun Summer Reading:

• The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need by Daniel H. Pink, art by Rob Ten Pas
• Beyond Bullsh*t: Straight Talk at Work by Samuel A Culbert
• Gotcha Capitalism: How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day – And What You Can Do About It by Bob Sullivan
• The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You by Mark Buchanan
• The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) by Jonathan Zittrain

Happiness, Health, and Work:

• What Happy Companies Know: How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Company for the Better by Dan Baker, Cathy Greenberg, and Collins Hemingway
• How: Why ‘HOW’ We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life) by Dov Seidman
• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
• Doubt is their product: how Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels
• Responsibility at Work: How Leading Professionals Act (or Don’t Act) Responsibly by Howard Gardner
• One Foot Out the Door: How to Combat the Psychological Recession That’s Alienating Employees and Hurting American Business by Judith M. Bardwick

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Martin, Roger L. The opposable mind : how successful leaders win through integrative thinking. Harvard Business School Press, 2007.

Author, and Dean of the Rotman School of Business, at the University of Toronto, Roger Martin studied fifty superior business leaders to discern a shared theme — what makes these people successful? He found that these successful business leaders had a special way of thinking. When faced with problems, they all were predisposed to construct solutions using diametrically opposing ideas, those that seem, on the surface, to be mutually exclusive. Successful leaders avoided settling for one alternative or another, but instead they produced a synthesis that was superior to either of the opposing ideas. Martin calls this thinking process Integrative thinking.

One example that Martin uses is a local company, Red Hat in Research Triangle Park. In the mid 1990’s the software industry was dominated by two business models. In the proprietary software model, companies invested heavily in research and development, guarded their intellectual property and charged high prices. These companies had high profit margins. The alternative model was the free software model where suppliers sold CD-ROMs that included both software and the source code. Prices were low but volume was high. These seemed to be the only two alternatives.
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Ariely, Dan. Predictably irrational : the hidden forces that shape our decisions.
HarperCollins, 2008.

Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for three weeks, currently at #5 for hardcover nonfiction. David Berreby has published an excellent book review of the book in the March 16^th Sunday NY Times.

You can also stop by the Ford Library and see our new display on behavioral economics. Check out Dan’s book or the others that are highlighted there.

Comments or questions?: reference-librarians@fuqua.duke.edu.

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Have you ever wondered why people act the way that they do?

Fuqua’s own Professor Dan Ariely has and he wrote a book about this subject. The Ford Library has a number of copies of this book as well as more great titles on the subject of human behavior (and business). (If you would like more information on Predictably Irrational, please see Dan Ariely’s blog.) As always, you can click on any title below to check availability or to place a hold.

• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
• Stumbling on Happiness: Think You Know What Makes You Happy? by Daniel Gilbert
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
• Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris
• Snipers, Shills, and Sharks: E-bay and Human Behavior by Ken Steiglitz
• Gimme! The Human Nature of Successful Marketing by John Hallward
• Egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (Or Most Expensive Liability) by David Marcum and Stephen Smith
• Behavioral Economics and Its Applications edited by Peter Diamond, Hannu Vartiainen
• Global Consumer Behavior edited by Chantal Ammi
• Explaining Consumer Choice by Gordon R. Foxall
• Economics and Psychology: A Promising New Cross-Disciplinary Field by Mandred F.R. Kets de Vries, Randel S. Carlock, and Elizabeth Florrent-Treacy
• Family Business on the Couch: A Psychological Perspective by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder
• Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris is Wrecking Companies and Careers and How to Avoid the Trap by Mathew Hayward
• Alpha Male Syndromeby Kate Ludeman & Eddie Erlandson

Taleb, Nassim. The black swan : the impact of the highly improbable.
Random House, 2007.

The Black Swan is a follow-up to the author’s 2001 best-seller, Fooled by Randomness, about the role chance plays in life. Fooled was controversial when released and continues to be a classic text in the hedge fund industry. Writing a general-interest book about probability is in itself quite an accomplishment. With Black Swan, it looks like the author (Lebanon-born, Wharton MBA, doctorate in mathematical finance, Wall Street hedge trader) has done it again.

This time, Taleb uses the image of a black swan to describe an event that is highly improbable yet causes a huge impact. Plus, after the event occurs, people concoct explanations for its occurrence in an attempt to make it seem predictable. The terrorist attack of 9/11 is a black swan. So is Black Friday in 1987. So is the development of the internet. Black swans can be either positive or negative, but either way, they have a huge influence on history.

The Black Swan considers fundamental questions about the nature of randomness. The central thesis is that the outliers, not part of the bell curve, are too often ignored by social scientists and these outliers have enormous importance for individuals, government, science and society.
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Tavris, Carol & Elliot Aronson. Mistakes were made (but not by me) : why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. Harcourt, 2007.

Tavris and Aronson’s book offers the following story told by organizational consultants Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus: “A promising junior executive of IBM was involved in a risky venture for the company and managed to lose over $10 million in the gamble. It was a disaster. When Watson [Tom Watson, Sr.--IBM's founder] called the nervous executive into his office, the young man blurted out, ‘I guess you want my resignation?’ Watson said, ‘You can’t be serious. We’ve just spent $10 million educating you!’” A $10 million dollar mistake is hard to hide, but why are most people reluctant to own up to any mistakes, even of the non-$10 million dollar variety?

Not only does no one like to admit mistakes, when confronted with those mistakes, most of us will go to great lengths to justify them rather than admit error. This book illuminates the ways self justification hinders our organizations, legal system, scientific research, and personal relationships. Full of pertinent examples from the interrogation of innocent suspects to the unreliable nature of memories, the book explains how the stress of cognitive dissonance and personal bias impairs our judgment in insidious ways. Tavris and Aronson make their case using an engaging combination of anecdotes and research studies. This book is well-written and thought-provoking.

© Reviewer: Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business. All rights reserved.