With a long background in international banking and finance I am an advisor, writer, and speaker on behavioural risk, disruptive change & decision making. My primary interest is in understanding the decision making and risk taking processes of people and organisations, and how we can make better decisions and take more profitable risks. In addition, much of my research and work concentrates on how to understand emerging trends in business; and how our own biases and behaviours affect the way we either succeed or fail in new environments.
I wrote...
Two Speed World: The impact of explosive and gradual change - its effect on you and everything else
We live in a bewildering world of change, which splits naturally into steady progress punctuated by sudden disruptions - the two-speed world. Steady progress ensures the survival of our species, but it is the disruptions that move us to a new level. Both types of change, slow and rapid, are important, because they mould and shape our lives, but because of their widely divergent characteristics it is sometimes difficult to recognise a major life-changer until it is too late. Even if we do spot the upheaval, we cannot deal with a change unless we understand it.
Examining leading-edge ideas and examples from history, this book gets to the heart of this dilemma.
Published in 1996 this book has rapidly become an essential read for anyone interested in risk and how over the centuries right up to modern times we have tried to measure and understand it.
Bernstein demonstrates a deep understanding of financial history, and the book has many important past examples. It really should be the first stop for anyone looking to get to grips with risk, and to understand the journey that has got us thus far.
Also importantly it’s a light read and not peppered with jargon or complex mathematics.
A Business Week, New York Times Business, and USA Today Bestseller "Ambitious and readable ...an engaging introduction to the oddsmakers, whom Bernstein regards as true humanists helping to release mankind from the choke holds of superstition and fatalism." -The New York Times "An extraordinarily entertaining and informative book." -The Wall Street Journal "A lively panoramic book ...Against the Gods sets up an ambitious premise and then delivers on it." -Business Week "Deserves to be, and surely will be, widely read." -The Economist "[A] challenging book, one that may change forever the way people think about the world." -Worth "No one…
Ormerod has written an entertaining and informative book on the complexity of systems, organisations, and human behaviour. Using many examples, he shows how even dominant organisations can falter and wither away.
He is particularly interesting about the nature of failure, and whether through small increases in better judgement and decision making, organisations can in fact continue to prosper.
With the same originality and astuteness that marked his widely praised Butterfly Economics, Paul Ormerod now examines the “Iron Law of Failure” as it applies to business and government–and explains what can be done about it.
“Failure is all around us,” asserts Ormerod. For every General Electric–still going strong after more than one hundred years–there are dozens of businesses like Central Leather, which was one of the world’s largest companies in 1912 but was liquidated in 1952. Ormerod debunks conventional economic theory–that the world economy ticks along in perfect equilibrium according to the best-laid plans of business and government–and delves…
This a slim but very interesting volume. As a mathematics professor Paulos sets out to explain how we can misunderstand statistics, and why this happens.
The book assumes no real serious mathematics ability on the part of the reader, but carefully guides us through the dangers and pitfalls of statistics. Myriad examples of wrong or poor use of statistics are given, and I found the book prompted me to look far more carefully at what a given statistic is telling me, or more accurately what it can’t tell me!
Why do even well-educated people often understand so little about maths - or take a perverse pride in not being a 'numbers person'?
In his now-classic book Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos answers questions such as: Why is following the stock market exactly like flipping a coin? How big is a trillion? How fast does human hair grow in mph? Can you calculate the chances that a party includes two people who have the same birthday? Paulos shows us that by arming yourself with some simple maths, you don't have to let numbers get the better of you.
A long and detailed account of the role of science in our decision making.
Ball demonstrates a sure touch over a myriad of topics, whether it be what causes traffic jams, the behaviour of gas particles, or the best way to design fire exits. The author has a deep and wide understanding of science and is able to share this knowledge with many real-life examples.
Whilst not a light read it is well written and opens up the reader to a far wider way of thinking about how “the real world” acts and reacts.
Is there a 'physics of society'? Philip Ball's investigation into human nature ranges from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, across economics, sociology and psychology. Ball shows how much of human behaviour we can understand when we cease trying to predict and analyse the behaviour of individuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions, in circumstances in which human beings both co-operate and conflict, when their aggregate behaviour is constructive and when it is destructive. By perhaps Britain's leading young science writer, this is a deeply…
A fascinating look at Complexity Science and so-called self-organising systems and how they contribute to wealth creation.
This a rather long, and maybe slightly daunting, book. A criticism might be that the author is long winded in some of his detailed examination of new themes and ideas in economics. However, at the heart of the book is the desire to understand how real people, make real decisions in the real world.
Economics is changing radically. This paradigm shift, the biggest in the field for over a century, will have profound implications for business, government and society for decades to come.
In this groundbreaking book, economic thinker and writer Eric Beinhocker surveys the cutting-edge ideas of the leading economists, physicists, biologists and cognitive scientists who are fundamentally reshaping economics, and brings their work alive for a broad audience.
These researchers argue that the economy is a 'complex adaptive system', more akin to the brain, the internet or an ecosystem than to the static picture of economic systems portrayed by traditional theory. They…
As a trauma therapist and dedicated researcher, I love uncovering valuable insights within lesser-known books. There are hidden gems, free from the pressure of commercial success, crafted by authors deeply committed to research, understanding, and the art of writing itself. Their dedication resonates with me, as I believe in the profound value of information and the power of critical thinking. Through my own book, Traumatization and Its Aftermath, I aim to emphasize that psychological concepts often lose their depth in translation and my mission is spreading awareness and fostering a deeper understanding of trauma and its intricate facets. With that idea in mind, I chose these five titles.
A fresh take on the difference between trauma and hardship in order to help accurately spot the difference and avoid over-generalizations.
The book integrates the latest findings in brain science, child development, psycho-social context, theory, and clinical experiences to make the case that trauma is much more than a cluster of symptoms to be tamed, but instead best understood as development gone off course, away from growth and towards (only) survival.
This book prompts a profound shift in perception, inviting to view trauma as an intricate and diverse experience, a point of view that ultimately leads to sharper treatment and, hopefully, more healing. It encourages a transition from asking, "What happened to you?" to the deeper question, "What is your relationship with what happened to you?"
Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders
The book is comprehensive, bold, and practical-a much-needed resource for the assessment and treatment of trauma. Instead of the traditional focus on the overall importance of healing, Traumatization and its Aftermath decodes why some people don't heal as easily as others, analyzes the various failures of diagnosis, and explains how to make therapeutic interventions truly effective.
This book offers a systemic deep dive into traumatization that clarifies myths and misinformation about the entire spectrum of trauma and provides both clinicians and non-clinicians with the right level of validation, preventive measures, conceptualization methodology, assessment tools, and healing facts that have not…
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