Thinking Fast and Slow

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

This is a book that has been amply praised and referenced in Ted Talks, on social media and elsewhere, and the research that led to its publication is the subject of a Michael Lewis book called The Undoing Project.

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for behavioral economics, even though he is a psychologist, based on the research that he did with Amos Tversky, and the insights they developed about how markets work, based on human behavior and how people assess probability.

In my opinion, the core value of this book to us as individuals, and as businesspeople and leaders, is what it tells us about how we make decisions, and how often those decisions are flawed based on our tendency to inaccurately assess the probability of outcomes or events, and our tendency to rely on assumptions about our knowledge base and its value in predicting the outcome of our decisions.

I have learned from experience, and I’m sure many business leaders would agree, in the course of my career, how foolish and unproductive impulsive decision-making can be, but this book showed me why, and what the thought processes are that lead to that kind of thinking. I would say unequivocally, READ THIS BOOK. It is one of my most valuable reads of the last ten years.

(N.B. it’s slow going in parts, but don’t give up, it’s absolutely worth the effort)