7/27/2019 Three Insightful Books for Your Summer List by
Muhammad EL Erian
1/2
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130630081211-204274949-three-insightful-books-
for-your-summer-list?trk=tod-home-art-medium_0
Three Insightful Books for Your Summer List
The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better
Groups, Firms,
Schools, and Societies.
Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People,
The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain
World,
If you still have room on your summer reading list, here are
three books that will familiarize you
with concepts and tools that I think you might find very useful
in both your personal and
professional lives.
Judging from both my experience and that of colleagues at PIMCO,
each of these books is highlyinsightful, accessible and powerful.
Together they provide theoretical and practical approaches to
deal with todays fluid and complex world.
Unconscious bias: Even good people can fall hostage to
unconscious bias. Indeed, there are
sound scientific reasons for this. As a result, we end up with
blind spots that undermine our
ability to make consistently good decisions, especially in a
rapidly changing world.
In a brilliant book called Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good
People, Mahzarin Banaji and
Anthony Greenwald provide valuable insights about the causes and
consequences of unconscious
biases. They also provide us with a framework to identify costly
blind spots, and with tools tominimize their risks and negative
influences.
Cognitive Diversity: We are all familiar with inclusion and
diversity efforts based on gender,
culture, race, sexual orientation, etc. But did you know that
identity diversity maps in an
important way to cognitive diversity; and that such cognitive
diversity is essential for good
decision making, especially in a changing world?
Scott Page provides a convincing discussion of the issue in The
Difference: How the Power of
Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.
Combining solid theory with
practical and accessible examples, the book provides us with a
thorough understanding of what ittakes to maximize the probability
of sustainably sound group decision making.
Active inertia: The importance of these two concepts are
highlighted by the third: Repeated
evidence that companies, governments and individuals can easily
fall into the trap of simply
doing more of the same rather than adapt to the worlds changing
circumstances. Indeed, this is
one of the main reasons why some highly successful and
accomplished entities/individuals have
failed to maintain their track record.
In a powerful little book called The Upside of Turbulence:
Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain
World, Don Sull takes us through the behavioral implications of
paradigm changes. He provides
us with insights to minimize the trap of active inertia and,
thus, increase the probability of
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130630081211-204274949-three-insightful-books-for-your-summer-list?trk=tod-home-art-medium_0http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130630081211-204274949-three-insightful-books-for-your-summer-list?trk=tod-home-art-medium_0http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130630081211-204274949-three-insightful-books-for-your-summer-list?trk=tod-home-art-medium_0http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130630081211-204274949-three-insightful-books-for-your-summer-list?trk=tod-home-art-medium_0http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130630081211-204274949-three-insightful-books-for-your-summer-list?trk=tod-home-art-medium_0
