Useful analysis of factors affecting decision making

In this lovely, useful book, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein examine choices, biases and the limits of human reasoning from a variety of perspectives. They often amuse by disclosing how they have fallen victim to the limitations of thought that they are describing. The fact that these educated, articulate professionals can fool themselves so often demonstrates how tough it is to think clearly, a point the authors emphasize and even repeat. Humans fall prey to systematic errors of judgment, but you can harness this problematic tendency productively, including by helping others make better decisions. Some of the authors' suggestions may not be practical, but many are and all are interesting. getAbstract recommends this book to anyone who wants to know how to shape responsible decisions.

The 4-Hour Work Week

After reading the reviews and skimming the book in a local bookstore I bought this book.<br />To be honest it isn't a bad read and some tips (like leaving a message on your email, focusing on outcomes before you have a meeting and outsourcing where possible) were quite interesting but the main drawback seemed to me that it was really just a book for management and sale people not real producers and"wealth creators"<br />If you are a factory worker making cars, computers widgets etc you have to be there full time you can't outsource that work.<br />If you are a doctor you need to be there more than 4 hours a week<br />A teacher, nurse, shop worker, bus driver, airline pilot (the list goes on and on) can't expect to be paid a full salary for a 10% workload.<br />It just reinforces my prejudices that we really don't need managers at all!!<br />Remember the space ship in hitch hikers guide that was full of management gurus and telephone sanitizers-- Now they could do a 4 hour week!!

Invest In This Book, Invest In Yourself

With more than one million copies sold and an endorsement on the cover by Warren Buffet, you know there has to be something to this book- and I think I know why. Simply because it is the first book ever to describe the emotional framework and analytical tools necessary for financial success for individual investors. <br /><br />Probably the single best book on investing written for the lay-public and the stock market bible since its first appearance in 1949, it's a great resource, although it's quite a thick book and filled with detail- and probably not for anybody but the serious stock market investor. And if getting motivated to start investing is your problem, suggest The Sixty-Second Motivator. Good luck! <br /><br />

Essential reading for anyone embarking on a Law degree

I bought this book 3 years ago before starting my LLB, and bought it again last week as I hope to study for an LLM next year and wanted to brush up on my legal skills.<br /><br />The book is very good at getting a prospective law student to think like a lawyer. It sets out very well the areas that a student needs to know about, such as judicial precedent, statutory interpretation and the now unavoidable influence of the European Union and the European Convention on Human Rights on English law.<br /><br />Two minor criticisms. Firstly, I think the authors do not clarify or explain certain topics enough, especially as this is aimed at students who have not yet studied Law. Secondly, there are countless typing and printing errors in the 6th edition. This can be very distracting and means that perhaps the book does not convey the professionalism you would expect from a legal text.

Disappointing - over promises and under delivers

Well, let's start by an admission, I'm only 1/2 way through so far. I'm writing because I feel the book is underdelivering on its core promise - that of being a way to improve ones own ability to persuade.<br /><br />I work in marketing and am always interested in new ways to increase the persuasiveness of what I do - both to persuade customers to buy more, but more importantly to be more persuasive with the internal stakeholders I need on my side in order to be able to do anything at all.<br /><br />And this is where it falls flat. Yes, the book is well researched. And yes, it's useful to help yourself stop being a 'patsy' (Caldini describes himself as the ultimate mug who learned to recognise how he was being played by persuasive salesmen). However, the book has two main failings.<br /><br />1) it's old, old, old. The examples used are from 30+ years ago. Read through examples of Encylcopedia salesmen going door to door and you'll think..."hmmm, how is this relevant in helping me sell in the C21st?"<br /><br />2) it's highly general, and not applied. Caldini (so far) has set up 6 attributes of persuasiveness, which he's researched and can support with lots of interesting personal anecdotes. But the attributes are so general (likeability), and the anecdotes either so lab-based ("we put a likeable student in a room with other students...") or so shallow ("when a salesman smiles at you...") that you again can't take anything specific and useful away.<br /><br />A pity. But I'd strongly suggest that this one is worth a visit to the library to read, but not the £5-£10 that it'll cost to buy.<br /><br />

Better than I thought it would be

I started this book with a very cynical view thinking it wouldnt be that good. I was pleasantly surprised though to find it is in fact quite interesting and has many helpful ideas.<br /><br />The page on looking at a persons eyes to see if they are thinking about the past, present, remembering etc is very accurate. I tried it myself and it seems to work.<br /><br />Definately a useful book to read and find out more about NLP.

Not bad, but...

This is not a bad book. Actually, I'm ok with having bought it here at Amazon. However, that was not my impression when I started in the first chapter; I thought"oh no, not again, another book of a wannabe self-proclaimed"guru"". From chapter 3 onwards it became better, but I have one serious problem with this book: I do understand Cialdini is an academic, but I really wish he would stop cluttering up the text with all these side steps to academic research; it's annoying. Just pose your statements, explain them short and clear, and put all your detailed explanations of academic research that supports your statements in the footnotes. This is your typical book where you have to turn back two pages constantly to see"what was his main argument?". This book could be considerably shorter, *still preservering the same value when it comes to insight", and would make for much more pleasant reading (Mind you, I hold a PhD myself, I know this is academic writing. That's fine when your audience is the academical world, but that is clearly not what the intended audience of this book is). To conclude: there are some valuable lessons contained in this book, it is worth the money, but it needs to be less on the academical details, because that distracts.

Good, but very light on content

This is a good, fast paced read. It can be read in about an hour. It contains very basic people management skills information, wrapped into a story. The basis of the story is that there is a manager who can restrict his contact with colleagues to one minute bursts and be the most effective manager in the organisation. A newcomer learns the skills and represents the reader in the story. Most managers you know have read this book, so if you have not, buy it and read it tomorrow - must keep up with the competition!

Absolutely fascinating.

I was given this book to review several months ago, and it's been sitting on my 'to do' shelf ever since. I kept procrastinating because... well, it seemed like it would be a very dull read. I didn't even know what 'Behavioral Economics' was, and it didn't exactly sound like a page-turner.<br /><br />In fact, I've discovered that I couldn't have been more wrong. It *is* a page-turner. I usually picked it up intending to read just one chapter, then didn't set it down until I'd read three or four.<br /><br />The chapters are quite short and 'bite-sized'.<br /><br />The book explores a lot of the totally illogical things that we do from day to day. Things that hurt our bank balance, or our health, or our relationship with family or work colleagues. It's full of interesting experiments that have been carried out to back up the thesis, and gives occasional pointers on how get ourselves out of our self-imposed traps.<br /><br />Not that the 'traps' are always self-imposed. When you read the book, you'll find a trip to the supermarket will be a whole new experience, and you'll never feel quite the same about those 'buy one, get one free' offers. You'll have a much better awareness of how salesmen, advertisers, and probably governments manage to manipulate us so easily.<br /><br />Definitely recommended for anyone interested in why we humans do the crazy things we do.

A very clear and useful book

A colleague recommended this book to me and I've used it to help me with a bit of a runaway project I was landed with. The chapter on planning really hit home, it made me sit down and think again. I could see myself falling into the all pitfalls they described. It's given me a list of points to work through and some confidence that I'm going in the right direction now. <br /><br />I've also used a lot of the ideas in the chapter dedicated to risks and issues. I've had plenty of these to deal with! I smiled and nodded my head when I read about people who see dealing with r&i as a boring administrative exercise. The book provides simple ways to turn this into a very useful exercise, how to get them under control and how to deal with the problems that matter.<br /><br />I was in firefighting mode when I first read the book so I tended to dip into certain chapters. But now things are back on track I'm taking a more leisurely stroll through the book again. The advice on people management is paying dividends now, especially as I was coming close to making one of classic mistakes they described. Reading the chapter on lessons learned was very useful too, yet another area I paid very little attention too previously. <br /><br />As a general point, the book helps you to think ahead and try to avoid storing problems up for yourself. The book has got loads of check-lists and"top tips" - which are practical and make the advice easy to take on board. Whilst there's nothing on project management tools (e.g. PRINCE) this is probably a plus point. You know that the advice comes from experience rather than trotting out dry theory.<br /><br />

Good Text At Parts But Repeats Like A Merry Go Round!!

I cant be to critic, about this, because land law without doubt is a complex and ever evolving branch of law, which can drive anyone up the wall, regardless of writing or reading etc.<br /><br />The original part of this part in the introduction of a virtual landscape and fictional characthers in a very good point and does bring home some more complex elements down to earth, and the book is if anyone in depth, perhaps at some points to much, especially when considering old laws that dont bear no resemblence to modern law now, but i guess thats the fun of law to!! <br /><br />But on a negative side, in my eyes, the case history in the book is not at times using cases of simplicty to get the point across and are often long winded affairs and to which even sometimes they cut off from wording because of!!, dosent hol much hope for the student i think!<br /><br />Also you often find that you read something and then later think you reading the same thing, ( like a dream when you wake up and suddenly remember you dreamt it!! lol ) that really does annoy me, because sometimes you end up chater surfing and thats not a good thing to be doing alot, aslo i would recommend if you want to make any sense of the starting chapters or later ones, invest in a equity and trusts book because if you havint covered it in property 2 yet, you really going to be lost off, at least i was!!<br /><br />Anyway, its got its good points and bad points, but in balance, i would have to fair and say for me personally, i have read better books that i find easier, but thats me, and for me its bad points out number the good ones.<br /><br />Sorry but i would give serious thought to over texts before reading this

Couldn't really get on with it.

Of all my subjects English Legal Systems is the one that is a bit of a struggle. Not because it is difficult but because it just seems to dull. My lecturer seems bored herself which doesn't help and neither did recommending this dire book to us. It definitely falls into the category of one of these set texts that you buy because you are told to, try to read once or twice and then abandon to sit in pristine condition on your bookshelf ready to sell at the second hand book sale as 'no markings or highlighting but a really useful book' in the hope that some poor unsuspecting first year will buy it and at least give you some money back. I don't think that Legal Systems need to be complicated and detailed. It needs to be clear and what it really needs is to be linked with other subjects. Has anyone every mentioned precedent to you in any subject other than Legal Systems? My advice would either to buy a heavyweight book like the book by T. Ingram or to buy one of the short snappy ones that give you all that you need in one bitesize and relatively painfree chunck like the Law Express one. But whatever you do buy, give this one a miss. I think that all students should read the at least one chapter of any book before they buy it so that they can weed out the dross rather than unquestioningly buying stuff off the reading list.

The contemporary equivalent to 'In Search of Excellence'

This strong text is the contemporary equivalent of 'In Search of Excellence' that every self-respecting manager had on their bookshelf during the 1980s. Time will tell if the conclusions of this book are any more reliable than Peters & Waterman's contribution. <br /><br />The pretext of this book is 'how do you take a good company and make it great?' Finding case studies to answer this question is no easy task and the research team set about it by finding companies that performed at the industry average for 15 years, then outperformed the market for the next 15 years by a factor of 3:1. <br /><br />The team then interview and investigate the companies themselves and come up with some interesting and thought provoking findings. Out of these investigations come some concepts that will have enduring impact on management discourse - the most notable of which is the concept of a Level 5 leader (a person combining personal humility with professional will). <br /><br />So why not a 5 star rating? The one weakness is the relatively lightweight approach to case study. From an academic perspective, this book repeats the same mistake made by so many other studies - it interviews only senior managers and makes too much use of media reports (written by journalists who talk to senior managers). Whilst I appreciate the access issues, good quality case study work involves a wider range of people and the theoretical conclusions of this book may - like its 'excellent' predecessor - unravel due to a failure to investigate any views other than those of managers.