Power of Habit


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Hardcover
371 pages
ISBN 9781400069286 Published Feb. 2012
Random House
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Power of Habit
Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
By Charles Duhigg 

Related Blog Posts
The Best Books of 2012, Amazon Edition
Posted Nov. 28, 2012 2:50 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Amazon's editors have come up with another fine list of books this year. Their choices in the Business and Investing category are:

But, as always, the books that would interest a business book reader aren't confined to the Business and Investing list. Private Empire is also listed in the History category, as is one of Jack's favorite books of the year, Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer by William Knoedelseder, published by HarperBusiness.

In the general Nonfiction category, The Signal and the Noise and The Power of Habit both made the list along with Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain (published by Crown).

The Signal and the Noise also made the Politics and Social Science list—along with Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, and also published by Crown— and the Science list (it's been a very good year for Nate Silver). One final Science title that may interest some business readers is Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are by Sebastian Seung, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.



The Best Books of 2012, A Season of Lists
Posted Nov. 26, 2012 5:24 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

The season of lists is upon us. The first ornament up on the tree was Steve Coll's Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, published by The Penguin Press, which took home the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year earlier this month. And there was another large nonfiction title related to economics—Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson and published by Crown Business—on a list of The 10 best books of 2012 from the Washington Post.

CNNMoney put up a list of The 5 must-read business books of the year two weeks ago that included:

Late last month (unnoticed by us until searching for the list we know they put out every year this morning), Hudson Booksellers announced their Best Books of 2012. Being an airport bookstore, they always stock and sell a lot of business titles, and always include a Business Interest section of their yearly list. This year's included:

And, finishing up this morning's round up, we have a list from Fast Company put out today, which includes the following 12 titles:

We'll have two of the larger, more comprehensive lists—and two of our yearly favorites—up on the blog for you this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

We've also picked our own extensive shortlist here at 800-CEO-READ, and will begin announcing that on December 10th, so be sure to keep an eye out for that, as well.



Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Posted Nov. 13, 2012 7:55 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

This morning I perused the Amazon Top 100 for 2012. A few of our favorite books that made the top 20: Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise; Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit (our JCS review here); and Susan Cain's Quiet (our take here.) Rounding out the top 40 is a book that's been sitting on my desk for awhile, daring me to crack it open: Nassim Nicolas Taleb's Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.

Over the weekend, I took that dare.

Why is reading and summarizing Antifragile such a nervy challenge? Practically, because it is a 544-page tome (with a labyrinthian Table of Contents) that already hints in its title its level of complexity. "Antifragile"--what exactly does that mean? The opposite of fragile? Unbreakable? Solid? And "Things That Gain From Disorder"--advantages to be had from chaos? Circling back around to the title: So, chaos can create solidity? Seems an oxymoron that isn't going to be easy to get my head around.

Then, there is the author to consider, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is most famous for introducing "black swans" to our common lexicon and has since put out many books, including The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, that aim to rejigger our understanding of the world and our attempts to make sense of things. The theory of black swan events is that there are rare, highly 'impactful' events that happen that cannot be predicted, and should not be thought to be able to be predicted just because hindsight lends us some understanding of the event once it has passed. Antifragile aims to take the black swan theory and apply it more broadly to teach how to live peaceably with random events that may have no explanation but contribute to a greater strength as a whole.

Let's take a look at the book.

Taleb begins his Prologue with a surprisingly clear and streamlined explanation of the very oxymoron that I touched on above. In the opening section titled, "How to Love the Wind," Taleb writes:

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.

Ah, now we see very clearly what we're dealing with here. While most people fear that change will put out our flame, we have a choice to use change to fan that flame.

Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author's nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.

We just don't want to just survive uncertainty, just about make it. We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition--like a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics--have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable. How?

There is a lot to learn already about this book in that small section. Taleb has a strong voice and a strong opinion and a certain tendency to reference unfamiliar things (Roman Stoics particularly versus other kinds of stoics, anyone?) that will prompt you to have Wikipedia open on your nearest device as you read. ("Later Roman Stoics focused on promoting a life in harmony within the universe, over which one has no direct control.") But he is also digging at something that intrigues all of us, so much so that we've constructed religions and philosophies around the fear of uncertainty. And as a result, we would all prefer, I think, to become "antifragile" which Taleb defines this way:

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder and stressors and love adventure, and risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it anti-fragile.

And what is the cost of tending too much to the fragile, of wrapping ourselves in a kind of risk-averse bubble wrap? "We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything...by suppressing randomness and volatility." Taleb reveals, it seems, his interest in the topic, his motivation for writing this book, and the lesson he hopes to bestow on readers (perhaps especially the neurotic ones) in this emphatic line: "I want to live happily in a world I don't understand."

Don't we all? Wouldn't that be quite a bit easier than trying to understand and be happy in a world that at times defies explanation? But control is seductive. "Black swans hijack our brains, making us feel we "sort-of" or "almost" predicted them, because they are retrospectively explainable." For example, it's common for people to respond to a wrench in their plans by saying, with both resignation and purpose, "Ah well, everything happens for a reason." Taleb is decidedly and emphatically saying the opposite, "No, there is not always a reason for everything: and that's ok."

With Antifragile, Taleb is offering us a 500+ page manual to achieve antifragility. He himself admits that here he has become a "practitioner" of his cumulative theories ("I eat my own cooking."), and this book is "a main corpus focused on uncertainty, randomness, probability, disorder, and what to do in a world we don't understand, a world with unseen elements and properties, the random and the complex; that is, decision making under opacity." And throughout, Antifragile is crammed with Taleb's unique and aggressive style of mixing the scholarly, the historical, the modern, the profound, and even the minutia, amounting to a mountain of thought that Taleb intends will "revive the not well known philosophical notion of doxastic commitment, a class of beliefs that go beyond talk, and to which we are committed enough to take personal risks." In other words, Taleb wants us to do, not just think about doing.

If I attempted to cover all the ground in Antifragile, this post would be much too lengthy, so let's jump to Chapter 13: Lecturing Birds on How to Fly. Taleb opens the chapter reflecting on the wheeled suitcase. The wheel was invented some six thousand years ago, and yet, until four decades ago no one thought to put wheels directly on the bottom of a suitcase! What does it take, he seems to be asking, for us to get smarter--practically smarter--faster?

All those brilliant minds, usually disheveled and rumpled, who go to faraway conferences to discuss Gödel, Shmodel, Riemann's Conjecture, quarks, shmarks, had to carry their suitcases through airport terminals without thinking about applying their brain to such an insignificant transportation problem....And even if these brilliant minds had applied their supposedly overdeveloped brains to such an obvious and trivial problem, they probably would not have gotten anywhere.

I included this quote above because it encapsulates both Taleb's voice, somewhat haughty and bemused, but also because it reveals a truth made both complex and simple by his explanation. Ingenuity is not the property of the intellectually rich, and sometimes complexity impairs us from creating simple solutions for common problems. Taleb, of course, puts it differently, within the lines of his thesis:

This tells us something about the way we map the future. We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things look like. We use randomness to spoon-feed us with discoveries--which is why antifragility is necessary.

And from the wheeled suitcase, Taleb takes us through the "sneaky...process of discovery and implementation" in medicine and technology, and his deduction that "both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discoveries, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase." And so, he concludes: "antifragility...supersedes intelligence." And the risk of believing that all invention comes from great minds (not simple necessity) is that we are hindered by the belief that these great minds can take credit for "lecturing birds on how to fly" when the birds knew how to fly all along.

Antifragile is not an easy book. But, despite its length and breadth of reference, it is a readable book. The constant feed of wisdom--or perhaps awareness is a better word--that generates instant inner reflection ("Hey, I do that!") is intoxicating, page-turning. It's a great trip landing on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's planet, a planet displaying such big and rangy ideas, a topographical map could be constructed as a model for the snaking rivers, the breath-robbing mountains, and the dusty valleys, of his knowledge. Like any adventure, you may be taxed from the constant rough esoteric terrain, but that mirrors what Taleb is advocating in Antifragile. Embrace the volatility "to live in a world that does not want us to understand it, a world whose charm comes from our inability to truly understand it."

Put another way:

The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren't for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without certainty, and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risk.

(All quotations taken from advanced copy; Hardcover available November 27th, 2012)



The Longlist for the 2012 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book Award
Posted Aug. 10, 2012 8:20 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Andrew Hill's article yesterday in The Financial Times announcing the longlist for the 2012 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award was entitled A reading list to reflect loss of faith in capitalism. That headline is more than a little hyperbolic. The statement in the article itself that the list "includes an array of titles charting the strengths and weaknesses of the American corporate, economic and financial system" is a bit more accurate, especially if you replace the word "American" with "global." All that said, the list of books they've put together is really, really good.

We're so immersed in the flood of books that arrives here every day, noses down, plugging away on various ideas and projects to help spread those books and the ideas that they contain, that I sometimes forget to look up to take stock of the larger trends and bigger picture in publishing (that will certainly come later when we begin looking at the submissions for our own awards). Looking at this list yesterday afternoon made me realize just how solid this year has been so far, and that for as much as we read here I still have a lot more to do.

And so it's back to the grindstone.



Amazon's Best Books of the Year... So Far
Posted June 26, 2012 8:08 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Amazon has been putting out a mid-year list of the best books for the past few years now, and released this (mid) year's list yesterday. The books in the Business & Leadership category are:

The Nonfiction list is also full of titles business book fans might want to consider, including two that made the Business & Leadership list: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and Private Empire by Steve Coll, both of which made the Amazon editor's list of top 20 books overall.

The others on the Nonfiction list you may want to consider are Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain (Crown), Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character by Jack Hitt (Crown), and The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman (De Capo Press).

If you'd like to peruse Amazon's Best Books of the Year So Far in their entirety, head on over to the online empire's website.






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