The subtitle, “How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure”, signals that most of the action in the book is in American universities and colleges. These centres of learning are supposed to nurture the expansion of knowledge and to encourage critical thinking in their students. Instead, say the authors, they are promulgating what Lukianoff and Haidt call “three Great Untruths”.

The first, in a reversal of Nietszche, is The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. Thus, students must be warned about unpleasant or disagreeable content, protected from bad stuff, and given ways out if confronted by anything that upsets them. This can be found on British campuses right now, in the form of comfort rooms for those students upset by the fact that someone with challenging views is lecturing on-site – never mind that they are not compelled to attend the lecture.

The second is the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. This is surely counter to the evidence-based learning that is still the norm in at least some academic disciplines. Explaining an optical illusion, for example, or the placebo effect in medicine, are not compatible with this belief. But the idea of “my truth” is, as is the increasingly common view that if something causes offence, it is either bad or wrong or both, and should be removed.

The third is the Untruth of Us versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and bad people. This leads to massive over-simplification. People who say offensive things are the bad ones. I am a good person so I will not say anything offensive. But who decides what is offensive? This leads to an ever-shrinking palette of acceptable positions, which is inimical to the exploration of ideas and the development of critical thinking.

The book explains and illustrates the Untruths, showing how they are leading to the shutting down of young minds. Instead of developing independence and resilience they are increasingly fragile. As they pass into the workplace, the same principles and expectations are seeded there. So it’s no surprise that some of the greatest virtue-signalling and narrowest minds are found in the world of publishing, where jobs are greatly sought-after by bright young graduates from top universities. This was apparent in the fuss about publishing the Ickabog, a new children’s book by JK Rowling. Many young staff at her publisher, Hachette, threatened not to work if the book was not dropped. In that instance the publisher stood strong, but it is striking that these young adults thought this a sensible career move.

US culture runs ahead of the UK, so although the book is a few years old now, it’s as relevant as ever, because this phenomenon is still growing on both sides of the pond. There are shocking stories about cancellation and censure over seemingly trivial things, like a sombrero. That’s about cultural appropriation, obviously. The academic who suggested that it was unduly sensitive to tell students not to dress up in a sombrero ultimately had to leave her job. That was despite the fact the Mexican students themselves said sombreros are seen as a bit of fun in Mexico, worn more or less as fancy dress there too.

This is an essential read, then, both to understand this cultural phenomenon, and to frighten yourself about how mad things can get (though I suspect you’re not allowed to say mad any more. Mustn’t other those with mental illness.)

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I say this because there’s a lot of Maori legend and new-agey type stuff early on in the book, not least the subtitle on the front cover: “Unlock your potential with the ancient code of togetherness”. Don’t be deterred. It’s worth it. Eastwood is a native New Zealander who works with sports teams, particularly rugby teams, around the world. His ideas about how you build shared purpose and overcome differences are relevant to any team effort in the workplace, though it’s likely that only intact teams who are planning a future of working together will be able to do the fundamental work building trust and shared identity that he writes about.

This book isn’t only relevant for team-building, though. I see a strong resonance for brand managers in his ideas about a shared history, and how each of us is part of an unbroken chain in our team or tribe. I’ve always found it helpful to uncover the origin stories of a brand or company, the anecdotes people tell that capture its essence. Here’s an example. A hundred years ago the City of New York was ready to install its first city-wide telephone system. The Swedish telecoms giant, Ericsson, bid against the local competitor Bell. You’d expect the locals to know the market and to have the advantage. Bell proposed a system that could accommodate up to two thousand households, as per the brief, confident that telephony was a luxury most would never afford. Ericsson, with its Swedish concept of egalitarianism, proposed a modular system which could be expanded over and over, adding more households as the cost fell and demand grew. It was not part of their thinking to design something that would be limited to the fortunate few. Roll forward almost a century, and Ericsson was working more in mobile technology than the old-fixed line system that they’d installed in New York City. Their engineers invented a technology for short-distance communication between mobile devices. They named it after a Viking King, Bluetooth, and made it available without charge to the entire industry. Was that good for business? Maybe, maybe not. They did it because it was in their nature, a result of real, internalised values which had served them well for over a hundred years. In both cases, Ericsson’s choice was what was best for the majority, rather than for themselves.

Eastwood has also worked with elite sports teams in the UK. He writes about the England football team, whose current manager Gareth Southgate brought him in. You don’t have to be interested in sport, though, to follow his stories and see value in his ideas. The writing is personal, engaging and full of individual stories, making it an easy read. As the photo shows, it’s a book that people pass around with enthusiasm.

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The Scout Mindset, by Julia Galef

“Can I give you some feedback?” If those words make your stomach churn, or your heart sink, then Cath Bishop’s book is for you. The Long Win, subtitled The Search for a Better Way to Succeed”, can show us how to make the most of every learning opportunity, so that you can win even when you lose. We see how this can work in sport, in business and in education. As an Olympian, sport is of course Cath’s metier, but anyone who’s competed in sport knows that the pain of losing is deeper and longer-lasting than the joy of winning. Anything that can make it feel better is welcome. But most of us have no idea that even the ultimate win – an Olympic medal, say – can leave an athlete feeling lost and empty. How is it possible that achieving something you strive for, commit to for years, can feel hollow? Cath can explain that. She interviewed winners and losers at elite levels, as well as drawing on her own experience as an elite athlete and as a foreign office diplomat working in war zones. She translates the learning far beyond sport – unlike many athletes on the speaker circuit, she has experience in business as well as sport. Her book is full of examples and insight that change how you think about success and failure, and make you feel inspired, and unafraid, to learn.

The Scout Mindset, subtitled “Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t”, comes from different experience but is equally inspiring. It’s about reframing curiosity and knowledge. After all, thinking you know is a barrier to finding out. Julia Galef‘s work is about rational decision-making, and about how we can use empirical approaches to offset our biases. Of course we all know about unconscious bias, confirmation bias and the rest. What’s fresh here is that her approach is not so much a way of thinking to deal with all that as a way to engage with reality that can help. She contrasts a scout mindset with a soldier mindset, in which we reason and believe to fit pre-existing thinking and beliefs, consciously or not. Her engaging stories of true-life events which fell prey to soldier thinking span the centuries. Some may be familiar, like the infamous Dreyfus affair in France, about an actual soldier. Others, like the story of cholera and homeopathy in nineteenth-century England, are fascinating and, to me, new. Her analysis of Spock’s predictions in Star Trek is delightful. There’s also a challenge to test your own biases and confidence, or over-confidence. Then she shows how a scout mindset can help us see afresh. She shows how to apply this at work, despite the pressure to think positively and to project confidence. This is especially true in the worlds of innovation and entrepreneurship, where people are sometimes afraid to admit of anything less than complete confidence. With chapter headings like Coping with Reality, Motivation without Self-Deception and Influence without Over-Confidence, this section of the book is a handbook for the modern age.

These are both great books. The Long Win was chosen by the Financial Times as one of its best business books of 2020. The Scout Mindset came out in 2021 but Julia Galef’s podcast, Rationally Speaking, has been running for years. Cath Bishop uses her approach to work with business leadership teams. Julia Galef’s material  is on YouTube. Both deserve to be more widely known.

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WeWork in its heyday was a modern landlord providing attractive office spaces occupied by start-ups and the professionals who advised them. It was a workplace full of optimists. There were coffee and water stations, airy reception areas full of light and comfortable sofas. I worked with a tech start-up whose London base was in a WeWork office near Blackfriars Bridge. It was a nice place to be. There was a good idea at the heart of WeWork – not original to the WeWork founders, but one which they drove at speed and scale. It could have been a sound, profitable, sustainable business, as demonstrated by Mark Dixon who founded Regus and achieved precisely that. He features in the book a couple of times, baffled by the valuations being achieved by WeWork, and curious to unpick its secret sauce. He eventually concluded there was none.

The biggest lesson of this book is that people love a story-teller. Neumann spoke loftily, and swept investors and employees along on his grand vision of making the workplace more enjoyable, and making work more worthwhile. As time went on his story and his vision became grander and more outlandish – elevating the world’s consciousness, solving world hunger. If this was a business with “purpose” it was purpose on hallucinogenics. The book shows how people who knew better let him have his way, time and time again, because it was easier than fighting with him. Perhaps they hoped he was right. More likely, they hoped to cash out before it became apparent there was no path to profitability, and it was all talk. In start-ups, putting growth before profit is an accepted approach, but usually because the underlying business is profitable, and generating more of it will result in economies of scale. This is true for software as a service, the most popular tech start-up model: finding new customers costs money but servicing them once signed up is cheap. WeWork was not a technology business. It had no economies of scale, so there was no point at which its rapid growth would secure future profitability. In this case VC investing, leading ultimately to flotation on the stock market, looks a lot like a Ponzi scheme.

We also see how competition is not the elixir for fairness and transparency that Adam Smith imagined. It’s competition between the US megabanks JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs that stops anyone telling Neumann the unpalatable truth as the IPO approaches. No one wants to miss out on the $100m fees for leading the IPO, so he gets away with increasingly unreasonable demands and behaviour that is almost unthinkable in the workplace – unless you’re everyone’s ticket to a multi-million payday.

But perhaps the most astonishing part is the epilogue: they’re all at it again. Despite the failed WeWork IPO, the subsequent collapse of other much-hyped start-ups like Nikola, and the dramatic fall in valuations of former tech darlings Juul and Uber, there is once again an appetite among investors for founders who talk big. Seemingly the lesson about the pursuit of growth at the expense of profit has not been learned.

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The full truth only emerged nine years later because Wakefield sued Brian Deer, the Sunday Times Journalist who exposed him and the author of this book, for libel. This led to the disclosure to the court, and to the defence, of the medical files of the child patients on whom Wakefield had based his infamous claims. Only then did Deer discover that some of the children – remember, there were only twelve – were not autistic, while others had received their MMR vaccination after the onset of their behavioural difficulties. Not very convincing, is it?

By the time the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead found the courage and the process by which they could dismiss Wakefield, he’d mobilised a conspiracy machine that meant that no matter what the establishment said, it could all be dismissed as an attempt to conceal the truth. This is why this book matters.

We all know Wakefield’s small-scale study was discredited, his published paper in The Lancet eventually withdrawn, the man himself struck off the medical register in the UK. But this remarkable book shows the extraordinary extent of his deception. I thought the problem was that the study was poorly constructed, too small and anecdotal to be reliable. While this is true, the real scandal is much simpler and more shocking than that. Wakefield was recruited by a lawyer and together they claimed millions of pounds of legal aid payments for themselves (Wakefield’s share was just under half a million), on the pretext that they were investigating this possible problem. In reality, they had rather less altruistic goals. The lawyer wanted to find a basis on which to sue vaccine manufacturers. Wakefield wanted fame and fortune for some, any, breakthrough medical discovery, and switched his focus and claims several times along the way in pursuit of his goal. Both claimed plenty of cash in the process.

Then they actively recruited children to “study”, concealed or changed aspects of these children’s medical history that didn’t fit, and conjured up other “facts” that did. Data that undermined his hypothesis were ignored, while the hypothesis itself morphed from “measles virus causes Crohn’s disease” to “the MMR vaccine causes regressive autism”, despite no evidence. Wakefield also registered patents for a range of related tests and treatments that all depended on his work being true. These included: a lab test for the presence of the offending measles virus; some sort of as-yet-undefined miracle drug that would treat the afflicted children; and of course single-dose measles vaccines for which his work might generate demand. Conflict of interest? I’ll say.

Equally shocking is how many other clinicians went along with Wakefield’s project. He was not a paediatrician or gastroenterologist or anything relevant at all. He was not even practising as a medical doctor treating patients – he had a lab job. He recruited others to do the hands-on work. In some cases, distressed children were held down and given painful investigative procedures like spinal taps. These were not necessary, but they were chargeable.

Where is Wakefield now? In the USA, where the grift continues. He was a guest at Trump’s 2017 inauguration party in Washington DC. No longer talking about MMR and autism, he now claims all vaccines are dangerous. Why bother with a small claim when people are so willing to believe you that they aren’t interested in details? Measles cases, including permanent harm and occasionally death, are on the rise in the USA and elsewhere. The real danger isn’t vaccines, it’s this ex-doctor.

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The experiment, conducted by US academic Sheena Iyengar, involved a tasting stall for jam in a successful upmarket delicatessen in San Francisco. Customers in a shop were offered little tastes of different jam varieties, then a money-off coupon valid for that week. But sometimes the stall had 24 varieties to try, and sometimes only six. People tasted the same number of jams, two on average, whether there were six or 24 to choose from. They were just as likely to go on to visit the jam aisle, where everyone saw the same extensive range on the shelves. Those who’d seen the larger assortment spent longer looking at the range on sale. But they often walked away with no jam. The smaller tasting assortment led to more sales: ten times more.

Iyengar’s book explores the many facets of choice and how we respond to it. We tend to equate choice with freedom. But choice can also be stressful. Sometimes it is simpler to have choice taken away, or even to cede our freedom to choose. It can be liberating to say, You decide, or, I’ll have what she’s having.

Thinking you are making a choice can make you happy, or it can make you anxious. Studies of people making career decisions have shown that people are more likely to feel regret after making an active choice, even though a decision to do nothing is just as much a choice. In one such study, researchers took the responsibility for the decision out of their hands by making it for them on the toss of a coin.  More of those who made a change that someone else decided for them were happier six months later than those who maintained the status quo. And yet the evidence is that, without such a catalyst, people tend to default to the status quo. We see the consequences of our actions more easily that those of our inaction.

Then there’s freedom from and freedom to, which are quite different, as we have discovered in the age of Covid-19. I read this book early in lockdown, when precious few choices were available. Now, we have to decide what is best, for us, and for the wider good – which means deciding whether you will prioritise the economy, the environment, or your own personal situation. Go to the office and please your boss (and the Prime Minister), or keep working at home and feel safe, and be either more or less productive. Can understanding how we feel about choice help with that? I think it can. At the end of the book, Iyengar provides practical advice based on the topics of each chapter. Understanding, just as much as choice, can be liberating.

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The FT describes the book as “a polemic against the dangers of docility and group think in every walk of life.” These are two quite different but equally risky phenomena. We can become docile because of respect for hierarchy, or fear of authority, or a genuine but naïve belief that if the higher-ups think it’s ok then it must be. This is different from group think, where we simply fail to imagine different scenarios, or we are reassured by the conviction of others – a self-fulfilling situation. Remember when everyone in the UK thought house prices could only go up… until they collapsed? This has happened more than once, but still we take comfort from the certainty of everyone else.

Although UK-based, Heffernan is well-connected in the USA, and has collected fascinating first-person accounts that include New Orleans flood prevention efforts, the fiscal acrobatics at Enron, asbestos contamination in a Montana mining town, and crazy working practices in the gaming industry. Heffernan illuminates these situations but not to blame people for falling into the trap of wilful blindness. Instead she lays bare how it happens. She profiles those who dare to see, and to say what they are seeing. She has interviewed whistleblowers in the NHS, for example, and reveals the danger of a rigid hierarchy in which protecting your colleagues is more valued than people’s lives. This theme is also thoroughly explored in Matthew Syed’s book, Black Box Thinking, reviewed here. He contrasts the attitude to error in healthcare with the learning culture of aviation industry. One wonders whether, if surgeons’ lives were on the line as pilots’ are, the world of healthcare might become a bit safer.

There aren’t any easy answers, though understanding how wilful blindness happens – indeed, that it happens – is surely the first step in avoiding it. If you think this all sounds rather depressing, there is hope. The book’s final chapter provides a round-up of ways that organisations can tackle the problem. Ultimately, and perhaps most importantly, organisations are collections of individuals. The stories in this book show how thousands of people can act as if they are powerless, but sometimes just one courageous person can change everything. That is inspiring.

If you have the appetite for more reading on how one person can make a difference, try Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky. He’s a US-based academic and at times it’s quite abstruse but for those in business, especially trying to innovate, it’s stimulating and encouraging.

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Always a good story-teller, Syed illustrates with enthralling examples including the CIA’s failure to anticipate 9-11 and the Mount Everest disaster that was the subject of the book and film, “Into Thin Air”. It’s not surprising that he shows the value of different knowledge bases, and different perspectives – in the Everest case, literally. But it’s also about teamwork, leadership and communication, how misleading averages can be, and how it’s not just the bees who have a hive mind. We humans have collective intelligence, in a way. Both for idea generation and for complex problem-solving, none of us is as smart as all of us. I thought I knew this but the book provides both a robust theoretical framework and plenty of real-life proof. Ever wondered why it took so long for suitcases to have wheels on? It’s here.

There’s a striking chapter on the important difference between information bubbles and echo chambers, using white supremacists in the USA to show how it’s not lack of access to opposing viewpoints but the determined dismissal of those who offer opposing views that makes echo chambers so dangerous. Think of how conspiracy theorists see all counter-data as further proof of conspiracy, or how some media outlets are dismissed wholesale as fake news.

If you think this is all a bit right-on, bear in mind that Syed is the author of Bounce, about sporting achievement, in which there is a chapter titled “Are Blacks Superior Runners?”.

Syed’s previous book, Black Box Thinking, also has much to offer for people in business. Both touch on the sources of ideas and of innovation. In this book, Syed argues for two types of innovation: incremental and recombinant. Incremental innovation comes naturally to those immersed in their sector, but this also comes with limitations. Recombinant innovation, where ideas are cross-fertilised from other sectors, is hard for those with deep-seated, sometimes not even conscious, assumptions about how things work in their business. Hence the success of disruptors from outside the sector such as Nest in thermostats, Amazon in book retailing, Apple in personal computing, and the disastrous failure of once-dominant players in their sectors like Kodak, Wang (word processors) and DEC (computing).

He’s a journalist not a consultant or trainer, so this isn’t a practical guide. It doesn’t go as far as modelling how to construct an effective diverse team, but you’ll be highly motivated to give it a try. Maybe the place to start is by sharing this book with your colleagues.

Read more on the challenges for businesses of having limited perspectives here.

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Kahenman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow” is so packed with concepts it can make behavioural economics seem complicated. This book brings it back to first principles. “Undoing” refers to the challenge of making explicit and then removing assumptions about how people think and decide, assumptions which even the academics never questioned, because they went without saying. So many of Kahneman and Tversky’s concepts – heuristics, confirmation bias, loss aversion, the peak-end effect – are now familiar in marketing circles that they start to seem obvious, but Lewis shows how hard these things were to see when started without hindsight. This is a brilliant piece of research and writing, and a bonus for anyone who wants to problem-solve for themselves. We see how new concepts couldn’t be expressed until the old assumptions were revealed and set aside. Even so, the two friends sometimes stumbled into their realisations, finding a neat hypothesis and then having to dump it when it didn’t quite work, and pushing on to find something better.

The context of their lives, early Israel and its wars, the depth and tensions in their intense working relationship, are all honestly revealed. The only gap is that although we hear directly from Danny, we cannot hear from Amos, who died of a brain tumour aged 59. His quick sharp wit is clear though. He once said to an eminent physicist, “You know, Murray, no one is as smart as you think you are. In the early days, after Amos had given a talk, an unnamed English mathematician approached him and said, “I don’t usually like Jews but I like you.” Amos replied, “I usually liked Englishmen but I don’t like you.”

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His central thesis is that “don’t be evil” is a clever smokescreen. Google didn’t ask for permission to copy the entire contents of the world wide web into their servers and then index it. Nor to digitise all books, most in copyright, nor to photograph your house and your neighbour’s, and everyone’s.

Think instead of Ayn Rand libertarianism, coupled with, in some cases, deliberate exploitation of other people’s intellectual property. It’s summed up by this brief exchange in Rand’s vast novel, “Atlas Shrugged”:

“My dear fellow, who will let you?”

“That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”

Taplin covers the origins of Facebook, Amazon and YouTube, and the book is worth reading for that alone. But Jonathan Taplin has stories of his own to tell. He was tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band, produced Hollywood movies, and had a spell on Wall St. He was there when Dylan went electric. He knew the “tune in drop out” guys. So, he traces the social and cultural origins of the internet, way beyond Tim Berners Lee at CERN, showing the critical role of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and then its partnership with Steve Jobs and a nascent Apple Computer before that famous Super Bowl ad of 1984.

The cast of characters is spectacular, from the earliest hackers to the secretive billionaire Koch brothers. There’s Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, and now husband of Serena Williams, making an idiot of himself. A few criminals, including Dread Pirate Roberts the founder of Silk Road – real name Ross Ulbricht, currently serving life without parole in a US high security prison. Larger-than-life Kim dot com. Sean Parker, convicted hacker, founder of Napster, with his $10m Lord of the Rings-themed wedding. And Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, who says proudly “Of the six people who started PayPal four had built bombs in high school.” Not surprising then to hear him say, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

The other side of the story is that US regulation and anti-trust legislation doesn’t work. Designed on principles established by Hamilton (he of the hit musical, so clearly somewhat pre-internet), it’s intended to ensure competition, but focuses on consumer prices as the proof. We all feel queasy about the value of the data we’re giving away to Facebook and Google. But if the product appears to be free to the user, anti-trust legislation doesn’t seem to apply. Taplin sums it up like this: “Monopoly, control of our data, and corporate lobbying are at the heart of this story”.

There is hope. Apple is a dissenter from the libertarian creed. That’s why they support ad blockers to stop surveillance marketing, and fought so hard against being forced to unlock the San Bernardino bomber’s phone. On the sunnier side, there are some lovely examples of co-operatives, from the Sunkist farmers in the 1890s, through to Magnum photography, to local ISPs in Chattanooga providing a better service than the national players and regenerating their city. Incidentally, Sunkist was the earliest registered brand name, in 1908. It’s still going. Maybe that is some comfort.

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