Alex Edmans’ Grow The Piece is a useful book trying to refocus business on being beneficial for society. I have noted the key points on this before, see here. Here I’ll tackle a grab bag of points related to Edmans’ book and using a pie-growing mindset. Maximizing Shareholder Value Is Nebulous Often people like the…
Category: Management Theory
Three Principles To Guide Decision-Making
Alex Edmans, a finance professor, is having a bit of a moment at the moment. His book Grow The Pie that I’m discussing in two posts is a very useful addition to the field. This post will outline the core points of Edmans’ work. The other post will get into a few more finicky points…
Adaptive Market Hypothesis: Evolution And Financial Markets
Andrew Lo has a number of interesting works attempting to link evolutionary thinking and financial markets. See here for his 2006 piece in the Harvard Business Review, entitled Survival of the Richest. Lo shows how evolutionary thinking can be applied to financial markets and explains the idea of the Adaptive Market Hypothesis. Irrationality And Financial…
Curse Of Knowledge: Academic Edition
Nooshin Warren and her colleagues had the excellent idea to give advice to academics on making their writing intelligible. You may (or may not) be surprised to learn that a lot of academic research isn’t understood but you shouldn’t be shocked. One problem is the curse of knowledge. Academics Are Specialists: Which Makes Communication Hard…
The Three Purposes Of A Purpose
One of the big excitements of business at the moment involves discussions of a company’s purpose. Lots of firms think they should have one but where do you find a purpose? How do you know if you have a good one? What if no one believes you when you say you have a purpose? Jonathan…
Weird Versus Non-WEIRD
Joe Henrich’s book on the WEIRDest people in the world is ambitious and packed with ideas and data. To be honest it isn’t my sort of thing but you have to admire what he has done. He is looking at the psychology of weird versus non-weird people. Weird being western, educated, industrialized, rich & democratic….
Certification And Better Business
One challenge with stakeholder/better business ideas is that there are so many things to be good (and bad) at. Is it enough to be good for the environment if you are awful to your employees? If you give money to your local community does that absolve other sins? Opinions might reasonably differ. As such we…
The Marketing Of Better Business
How is the marketing of better business going? The Marketing Of Better Business In his book, Better Business, Christopher Marquis makes a fascinating claim. The B Corp movement is the most important social movement you’ve never hear of. Marquis, 2020, preface Assuming this is true it is both exciting and a bit of a concern….
Cynicism About Data
Tim Harford’s latest book targets cynicism about data. The villain of the piece is Darrell Huff. Huff is the author of a fun book on lying with statistics, see here for more. Harford argues we are in danger of writing off the value of statistics. Instead, we need to develop clearer ideas for understanding statistics….
Alexander The Great Man?
One way I judge people is how they see Alexander the Great. This is a very helpful approach to judging others. Invariably any celebration of the Macedonian king gives insight into the flaws of the person doing the celebrating. There is one rather obvious weakness with my approach to judging character. You might be surprised…
