Kahnemann: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahnemann got the nobel prize for his study. And he wrote one of the most important books on behavioural economics – ever. Does this have anything to do with tech. Not at first. But it is all about intuition, analysis and formulas and how we make desicions based on gut feeling or rationality. And now that we are entering a more and more data- and metric-driven society, it is about time to think about why we are acting the way we do and what algorithms want us to do. One thing upfront: this book is awesome!

Ormerod: Why most things fail

Paul Ormerod’s „Why most things fail“ was published in 2005. Before the subprime crisis, but nevertheless it is a crisis book, that deals with information, lack of information and „bounded rationality“ (Stieglitz / Akerlof). The question is the very basic „why do companies fail?“ – a welcome antonym to all sorts of overconfident management literature. And it seems to me it is he last book written before Big Data came to life. Ormerod leaves some barriers to decision-making and predictive analysis – these are exactly the barriers companies – such as Google or Amazon – try to break.