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Book Recommendation: The Upside of Irrationality

Dan Ariely (2011). The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic.

Dan Ariely is a great thinker, scientist and story-teller. In this book, he weaves personal anecdotes and research findings together to help us gain insight into our own irrational minds.

Recognizing our own behaviors and thinking patterns is a great stepping stone towards improvement. But rather than assume we could do better and be more rational (which I do believe is important and possible too, at least sometimes…), Dan Ariely suggests we should find ways to make our own irrationalities work in our favor. I find this mindset very useful in practice. In particular, he suggests many methods of how the “right” choice can become the “easy” choice for us. Those are great strategies to set us up for success.

In general,

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Book Recommendation: Willpower

Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney (2012). Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

This book is a collaboration of the psychologist and researcher Roy Baumeister with New York Times science writer John Tierney. Together, they created the kind of book I really love. It offers very practical advice, based on a lot of research. It provides very helpful insight into how we can increase our self-control, focus our strength, and better resist temptation. It is easy to read, but not dumbed down, nor diluted with unnecessary stories.

For those who are in money-saving mode after the holidays, you’ll most likely find this one in your local library. Ours (Multnomah County) even has the e-book for mobile devices, so you can borrow it from wherever you are. What I love most about those library e-books is that they return themselves –

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Two Book Recommendations for the Holidays

If you’re ready to cosy up by the fireplace with some good books, I have two suggestions. They are both classics in their fields, though of different times and genres. The first is a novel by one of the great German poets. The second is a concise introduction into the research on decision making.

1. Johann W. von Goethe. Elective Affinities, a novel published in 1809 .
(original: “Wahlverwandtschaften“; also translated under the title “Kindred by Choice“) .

The title refers to a chemical reorganization of substances, which Goethe uses as a metaphor for human relationships, and as a way to question our ability to choose our own actions and resist the forces of nature.
The novel begins at just at that point where many other stories end: with a happy,

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Book Recommendation: Your Brain at Work

David Rock. (2009). Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long.

This book gives very useful insights into how our brain works, and what we can do to make it work better. So far, it has been one of the most influential books for my own work in helping people be more productive in healthy and sustainable ways.

David Rock does a wonderful job bringing together a vast amount of research on cognitive neuroscience, and in helping us understand why our brains work better in some situations than others. Recognizing the limitations of our brain, he suggests very practical steps we can take to optimize our work days and maximize our brain’s potential.

He presents his advice through a series of anecdotes and stories of the “meet Emily and Paul” type.

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Summer Reading Recommendation: Children’s Fantasy for Grownups

Michael Ende. The Neverending Story.

Many of my German-speaking friends will have read this one, and would quite likely list it as one of their favorite childhood books. In the English speaking world, the book seems to be less well-known. Some people I asked seemed to have a vague idea of “wasn’t there a movie in the 80’s? With a white dragon…? Yes?” No! I’m NOT recommending the movie (among others, the author himself hated it quite fiercely).

The book, however, is one of the most beautiful fantasy novels I’ve come across, starting with the print itself: the hardcover edition is printed entirely in colored ink, purple and green, for the different story threads.

Without giving away too much of the plot: a shy and bookish boy, Bastian, needs to find his journey through a fantastic world and back into his own by following the (too?) simple instructions: “

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Book Recommendation: Smart Choices

John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, & Howard Raiffa. (1996). Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions.

It’s time to recommend another classic. This book is a short and very useful guide, presenting a variety of decision tools. It doesn’t offer too much in the way of psychological explanations of why we need the tools and how they work, but it is a nice little toolkit.

by Ursina Teuscher

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Book Recommendation: Strategic Planning

Erica Olsen. Strategic planning kit for dummies.

If you’re a decision-maker in an organization and you’re serious about strategic planning, I highly recommend this book by Erica Olson as a very thorough but practical reference. It will give you more than you need, but it is very clearly structured so that you easily focus on whatever aspects are relevant to you. It also includes a DVD with worksheets, templates, and videos.

Why does strategic planning matter?

Strategic planning offers a systematic process to figure out where you’re going – as a business or as any kind of organization.

Erica Olsen reports that CEOs of the Inc. 500 spend 50-90 percent of their time on strategy and business development. Why? Probably because they realize how much it pays off. According to her research, the firms with a high commitment to strategic planning had higher sales volumes as well as net incomes than those with lower commitment.

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Book Recommendation: Nudge

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

This book offers very well-researched insights into how “choice architecture” can successfully nudge people toward making the best decisions for themselves, such as choosing healthier food, exercising more, saving more money, etc. Nudges consist simply of changing the way choices are presented, without changing or restricting the options or adding any incentives.

The book is especially interesting for people who care about the promotion of human welfare in public policies, but the knowledge can also be help us change our own environment to help us make healthier long-term decisions.

As a very useful practical addition, Dilip Soman, Min Zhao, and Nina Mazar have published a free online-report called “A Practitioner’s Guide to Nudging”

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Book Recommendation: Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel T. Gilbert. Stumbling on Happiness.

This is my pick for the season: an entertaining and well-researched book about our failures to predict what will make us happy or unhappy in the future, and about how these misconceptions affect our decisions.

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Coaching Online or in Person — Does the Setting Matter?

What the research says about online coaching:

At this point, there is quite a bit of research on this question, for example showing that coaching over the phone or through online channels can be very effective, that adequate rapport can be established between a counselor and client, and that some clients prefer the reduced stigma and easier access offered by online mental health services.

For more in depth discussion, this handbook addresses many practical aspects of online counseling, such as technological, ethical, legal and multicultural issues, treatment strategies, and testing and assessment:

Kraus, R., Stricker, G., & Speyer, C. (Eds.). (2010). Online counseling: A handbook for mental health professionals. Academic Press.

My own experience with online coaching:

While I do enjoy in-person meetings with clients,

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Book Recommendation: “Decisive” by Chip and Dan Heath (2013)

Chip and Dan Heath (2013). Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. New York: Crown Business.

I was impressed with this new book by the Heath brothers, a very helpful guide to decision making. It does not offer any formal tools to evaluate options, but a process with powerful ideas that are easy to apply to any personal or business decision.

They call their approach the WRAP process, an acronym standing for (1) Widen your options, (2) Reality test your assumptions, (3) Attain some distance, and (4) Prepare to be wrong.

Here’s a sample of some ideas that I’m finding very effective with clients as well as for my own decisions:

For widening your options,

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Book Recommendation: Two Very Different Books about Happiness

Gretchen Rubin. The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.

Russ Harris (Author), Steven Hayes (Foreword). The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living.

On first sight, the two books appear to be on two opposite sides of the happiness controversy – should we pursue it or not? Should we strive to be happy, or is happiness only achievable as an indirect (and not guaranteed) consequence, or side-effect, of focusing on other worthwhile pursuits?
After reading both books, I find their opinions smart and differentiated enough to agree with both. Whether the authors would agree with each other, I don’t know…

Gretchen Rubin’s book is a delightfully honest,

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Book Recommendation of the Month: Rational Decision Making

Eisenfuehr, Weber & Langer. Rational Decision Making.

This month’s pick is a classic textbook, presenting theory as well as practical methods on how to improve decision making. It is admittedly not the easiest read, but those who are truly interested in the formal methods of how to approach difficult decisions will find this book very rich and thorough.

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Book Recommendation for February

Luke Rhinehart. The Dice Man.

Time for another fiction recommendation: the 70’s cult classic “The Dice Man” by Luke Rhinehart tells the story of a psychiatrist who begins making decisions based on the casting of dice, and develops a radical new approach to psychiatry with his “dice therapy”.

Warning: this book was banned in several countries due to the way it deals with controversial topics.

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Book Recommendation for the New Year

Charles Duhigg. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.

This book offers a very well-researched but easy to understand explanation of how we form and maintain habits. Gaining a deeper understanding of this general mechanism gives us as readers a very useful starting point to develop our own interventions in kicking old unwanted habits and forming new intentional ones. It is not the kind of book that offers a lot of specific advice, but it gives you the knowledge to develop your own best practices. I have found it a very useful framework for improving my own habits, as well as for my coaching work with clients who want to achieve specific goals in their work or personal lives.

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Book Recommendation on Consumer Decisions: “Spent”

I guess I could call this a “seasonal pick”, as Amazon keeps counting down the days to Black Friday:

Geoffrey Miller (2009). Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

Book cover (cropped) of "Spent" by Geoffrey Miller

Geoffrey Miller presents an evolutionary psychology perspective on consumer decisions: why do we buy so much, and why do we buy the stuff we do?
(No, it’s not about cave dwellers and their preference for fur.)

Just like his earlier book “The Mating Mind”, it was very much worth reading the whole book, rather than just leafing through it and thinking that I “got the message”. The main message may indeed be simple (conspicuous consumption as a mating signal to indicate fitness), but there is a huge richness in data and an elegance of theory that make this book thought-provoking, amusing, and insightful on many levels. It also helps that Miller is a fearless,

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Book Recommendation for October

Jon Krakauer: Into Thin Air

This is Jon Krakauer’s bone-chilling eye-witness report of the disastrous 1996 Mount Everest climb that killed eight people. I’m not going to discuss why this book is about decision making and goal achievement (well – the dark side of focusing on a goal). All I’ll say here is it was a page-turner for me. I have deep respect for a writer who can make 400+ pages about climbing a mountain go by so quickly, and yet leave such an impression.

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Book Recommendations of the Month

1. Ralph Keeney (1996). Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to
Creative Decision Making.

It may not be the quickest read, and not the shortest
guide to decision making, but one of the most useful in my
experience – powerful with a minimum of formality.
I consider it a wonderful classic in the field, worthy of
those last few weeks of summer reading time…

2. Javier Marias (1992). A Heart So White.

A novel about decisions surrounding secrecies and loyalties.
What I loved about it is that it seemed like a fugue – one
motive in a multitude of layers, interwoven beyond
recognition into a beautiful piece of art.

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