Book Review – Imperfect

Imperfect: An Improbable Life
by Jim Abbott and Tim Brown, 2012

Inspiring story of Jim Abbott’s life as he overcomes being born with just one hand to pitch in the major leagues for years. The book bounces back and forth from chapter to chapter between a semi-chronological biography and a detailed look at Jim’s no-hitter while pitching for the Yankees. Well read by Jim on the audiobook version. This book helped calm me down while I was stuck in the hospital for a week in March with a collapsed lung. Soothing and uplifting.

Book Review – The Snowball

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder, 2008

Long read (~850 dense pages), but very rewarding. Very well written. Gives insights into Buffett’s thought processes. He was/is supremely focused on business issues, sometimes to the detriment of other aspects of his life. But his honesty, work ethic, and teaching mentality took him a long way in life, obviously. Strongly recommended.

Book Review – The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust

The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust
by Kevin Werbach, 2018

I’ve incorporated some of the ideas of this book into my lecture on trust in supply chain networks in my Operations Strategy class. I introduce blockchain as a vehicle for trust and shared truth before discussing the potential for smart contracts to handle many simple business interactions. The book is well-researched and written. I found the first-half, focused on trust problems and blockchain capabilities, to be more interesting and relevant for me than the second-half, which mainly focused on legal and governance issues.

Book Review – The Four

The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
by Scott Galloway, 2017

I’m a bit late to the game with this one, and I think that helps explain why I enjoy Scott’s blog more than I did this book. The blog is more timely, while the explanations in the book are a bit stale. Still, it helps explain the success and corruption of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Entertaining, but not always convincing. I think the conclusion about these tech titans creating immense wealth, but for only a few people, is timely and pairs well with other things I’ve read about the future economy and income inequality. Multiple data inconsistencies (numbers on one page not agreeing with those on the next page) annoyed me.

Paper Published – Digital Nudging: Numeric and Semantic Priming in E-Commerce

Joint work with Alan Dennis, Linghao (Ivy) Yuan, Xuan Feng, and Christine Hsieh. Published in the Journal of Management Information Systems: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07421222.2019.1705505

Abstract: Most research on e-commerce has focused on deliberate rational cognition, yet research in psychology and marketing suggests that buying decisions may also be influenced by priming (a form of what Information Systems researchers have called digital nudging). We conducted seven experiments to investigate the impact of two types of priming (numeric priming and semantic priming) delivered through what appeared to be advertisements on an e-commerce website. We found that numeric priming had a small but significant effect on consumers’ willingness to pay when the value of the product was unclear, but had no effect when products displayed a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) or a fixed selling price. Semantic priming had larger effects on willingness to pay and the effects were significant but smaller in the presence of an MSRP. Thus, the combination of numeric and semantic priming has a larger impact on consumers’ willingness to pay. Taken together, these experiments show that some of the research on numeric priming and semantic priming done in offline settings generalizes to e-commerce settings, but there are important boundary conditions to their effects in e-commerce that have not been noted in offline settings. In online auctions (e.g., eBay), sellers can influence customers to pay more for products whose value is unclear by displaying products with clearly labelled high prices alongside the products the consumer searched for. However, such tactics will have only minimal effects for auctions of products whose price is known (e.g., those with an MSRP) and no effects on products with clearly listed prices (e.g., Amazon).

Book Review – The Book of Dust (Vol 2): The Secret Commonwealth

The Book of Dust (Vol 2): The Secret Commonwealth
by Philip Pullman, 2019

Some cool connections to the first volume in the Book of Dust, La Belle Savage (set 20 years earlier), and the original His Dark Materials trilogy (set ~10 years earlier). However, this book is really just setting up the third volume. The Secret Commonwealth ends with half a dozen story lines hanging uncompleted. Kind of frustrating. I would recommend waiting until the third volume is published before reading this one (which was published in Oct. 2019), so that you’re not left hanging after reading. Unfortunately, there is no current expected release date for the third volume.

Book Review – Nudge

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, 2008

I’m late to the party on this one, so I don’t need to say too much about it. Good description of why defaults matter and why data should be available in human understandable formats.

Book Review – More From Less

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned To Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee, 2019

Promising narrative about how we have reached/passed peak-impact on the world’s resources. For example, the U.S. reached peak paper usage in 1990. While more needs to be done to continue ensuring our environmental impact is in check, the dematerialization of many aspects of life in the last 20+ years has been impressive. McAfee cites capitalism, technological progress, responsive government, and public awareness as the Four Horsemen of the Optimist.

I do energy research and can constantly see signs for optimism that economic conditions will lead to less environmental impact in the future. In my opinion, the most worrying trend cited in the book is the loss of social capital and the feeling of disconnection in our modern world.

Pairs well with Factfulness by Rosling. I found the last few chapters to be repetitive; it could/should have been about 50 pages shorter.

Book Review – Ultralearning

Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career
by Scott Young, 2019

Anecdotal, but somewhat helpful. Wish he had more examples/data to draw from. The goal is to teach you how to learn a lot of hard things in a short amount of time.

Principle 1 – Metalearning: First Draw a Map
Principle 2 – Focus: Sharpen Your Knife
Principle 3 – Directness: Go Straight Ahead
Principle 4 – Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point
Principle 5 – Retrieval: Test to Learn
Principle 6 – Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches
Principle 7 – Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket
Principle 8 – Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up
Principle 9 – Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone