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
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…
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.
My core value is realistic education—learning from each other’s errors and successes, but with full awareness of the difference between the determined past and the uncertain future. We can benefit from uncertainty, which I’ve been doing for a living as an engineer, academic researcher, and inventor. I make use of knowledge and science as much as possible, but I also know that strategic decisions for the uncertain future require skepticism and thinking to deal with the differences in a new circumstance. With my core value, I am passionate about sharing insights and knowledge that our formal education does not provide.
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success—from fundamental physics, through evolution in biology, to how people learn, think, and decide.
This book presents a way of thinking and realistic knowledge that our formal education shuns. Stepping beyond this ignorance, the book shows how to deal with and even benefit from uncertainty by skeptical thinking, strategic decisions, and teamwork based on enlightened self-interests.
This bottom-up thinking is thought-provoking for leaders who wish to build teams rather than herds. The insights in the book will help you to be better prepared for the unexpected, less likely to conform when you…
Trial, Error, and Success: 10 Insights into Realistic Knowledge, Thinking, and Emotional Intelligence
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success. They didn't teach you this in school, even though you should know why the rigid laws of physics don't rule nature and don't inhibit your free-will decisions to try, fail, and succeed. As a guide to success, this book shows how skepticism, prudent use of science, and thinking lead to strategic decisions for the uncertain future.
Presenting real-life examples, the thinking in the book combines sharp analyses with broad analogies to show:
How to identify realistic knowledge and avoid harm due to overgeneralized concepts.
How to create new knowledge and solve…
