Hello! This your gentle reminder that the discussion online of Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets opens in two weeks. Please read the book by then! I’m sending this email to the entire Coaching Letter list, as a lot of people have been added since we started advertising the book club, and a lot of people have read the book but didn’t sign up for the reminders. Not too late to read it! Then join the Google+community and be ready to contribute between November 12 and 22. Anyone is welcome to join, so please feel free to forward this email to anyone you think would be interested.
If you have finished the book and are looking for something else to mull over in the same vein, you may wish to consider… You might start with this New Yorker piece on Annie Duke. Then you might watch her Google Talk. I’d like to also recommend following Annie Duke on Twitter, and checking out the hashtag #ThinkingInBets. (I’m on Twitter! @Isobeltx) And then maybe take a look at these books:
Tetlock, P. E., & Gardner, D. (2016). Superforecasting: The art and science of prediction. Random House.
This is a book about an experiment to see if it was possible to find and train people who are capable of making really good predictions about significant world issues. Turns out that it is, and this book details what these people do in order to become superforecasters. You know what Annie Duke says about quantifying probabilities? This takes it to a whole new level…
Silver, N. (2012). The signal and the noise: the art and science of prediction. Penguin UK.
Nate Silver is famous for his accurate political predictions. He has a website https://fivethirtyeight.com/ that is well worth checking out if you are either a political junkie or a fan of Thinking in Bets. There is also a podcast of the same name, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, etc. This book is a really good primer on the science of prediction.
“Red Teaming Handbook”
(yes, it is hyperlinked) We fall prey to many biases in our decision making, and red teaming is one of the ways in which organizations and groups can help themselves to see past those biases and get better at placing better bets. I love this source not least because it elevates skills sometimes sidelined because they are seen as “soft”, such as listening. This handbook makes it clear that those skills are not touchy-feely claptrap, but are crucial to making good decisions.
Duke, A., Diamond, D., & Thomsen, K. (2005). Annie Duke: How I raised, folded, bluffed, flirted, cursed, and won millions at the World Series of Poker. New York: Hudson Street Press.
Duke’s first book, I believe.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I want you to imagine the most arrogant, unlikeable person you know and realize that he has got nothing on Taleb. But the books are fabulous:
Fooled by Randomness
The Black Swan
Antifragile
Skin in the Game
If you search HBR for articles on decision-making, you will come up with thousands of hits, so I didn’t really try to figure out what to recommend—except for this article by Chris Argyris, one of my heroes, on decision-making and interpersonal relationships.
Please let me know if you end up reading any of these! Each of them is worth a discussion… Let me know if you have any other questions or suggestions, or want to be added or removed from the Thinking in Bets or Coaching Letter mailing lists. Thanks, Isobel
