Shane Parrish

And this talk on The Psychology of Human Misjudgment is one of the best you’ll ever hear.

Influence is one of the defining texts on the psychology of persuasion.

There are only a handful of websites that I read religiously. One of those is MarginalRevolution.com

Research has shown time and time again how irrational humans are in our thinking. We’re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn’t. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn’t fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see.

Well researched and well written, this book offers a 4 step process to help overcome our natural biases and make better decisions. On a side, if you’ve read Switch or Made to Stick you know how fun and easy a Heath brothers book is to read. This one is no different.

Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured, gets managed.” But how do you measure things as nebulous as customer satisfaction, organizational flexibility or the ROI of technology?

Written by recognized expert Douglas Hubbard—creator of Applied Information Economics—How to Measure Anything illustrates how the author has used his approach across various industries and how any problem, no matter how difficult, ill defined, or uncertain can lend itself to measurement (and therefore improvement) using proven methods.

According to the author, every “mess” has a similar structure. Whether we’re dealing with a crisis at work or at home, find ourselves in a muck with other people, or are trying to make sense of the deluge of information all around us, this book offers a 7 step process for making sense of it all. No mess is too big once you know how to properly tackle one.

If you work with groups of people in any way, this is a great read with lots of useful nuggets. We tend to assume that a group of bright minds working together to solve a problem would yield the best outcome, but research has shown that isn’t always the case. In fact, we tend to sabotage our own results by giving the most weight to the positions stated first, shared the loudest, or held in common with the rest of the group. In Wiser, you’ll not only learn how to avoid the pitfalls that plague so many meetings today, but how to get the best out of those participating, so your collective decision making becomes more effective, more productive, and a better investment of time.

Whether you are a teacher, a manager, a parent, or a leader in any way, you know how frustrating it can be when the individuals you’re trying to lead aren’t fully engaged. It’s bad for the organization, it’s bad for productivity, and quite frankly, it’s bad for the individual. The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures explores practical methods to help people get engaged and invested in what they’re doing — and feel personal satisfaction from doing it.

If your work environment isn’t one where employees feel safe to share their ideas and interact freely with one another, you can’t expect to accomplish anything significant. You’ll always be chugging along at less than full capacity. That’s where this book comes in. It provides over 80 games that are specifically designed to break down barriers, foster communication, and get the creative juices flowing.

Think you’re absolutely right on the hot political, social or religious debate of the day? Before you get into it with your brother-in-law over Thanksgiving dinner, make sure you read this book. Jonathan Haidt does a masterful job of showing that the other side isn’t as crazy as we think, and in fact, we’re all a bit more crazy than we’d like to admit. He draws on decades of research to show that what we consider to be moral judgments are not formed by sound reasoning, but by intuition. Understanding why and how that happens is critical to understanding each other. And a necessary part of having an opinion.

Who Moved My Cheese? gets a lot of love, but Spencer Johnson’s book on decision making deserves way more attention than it gets. In my opinion, it’s his best book. And it’s short, practical and easy to apply. You could read this over your lunch break and be a better thinker before you even finish your sandwich.

The Bed of Procrustes: 20 Aphorisms from Nassim Taleb