Review – Unlock your Business Voice
Review / March 8, 2018

Review: Simon de Cintra wants to help you unlock your business voice. What does that mean? Something about communicating better and getting heard. Like, when you are a subject matter expert you could learn to appear more leadershippy to add some gravitas to your speech. Something like that. How do you unlock your business voice, whatever that means? By applying the My Business Voice Methodology®. How do you apply the My Business Voice Methodology®? By using VOICE. The acronym stands for Vocation, Observation, Intention, Casting, Experiment. Let me quote from Unlock your Business Voice for you to clear things up: “The  first part of the My Business Voice Methodology®, Vocation, is all about choosing your mindset and therefore your role in any piece of communication that you deliver. This will, and indeed should, vary depending on the situation, but absolutely not according to the personalities involved.” Got that? Did you understand, what the vocation part is all about?  Well, I did not, so let’s have a look at the full programme to see if we can deduce the meaning of unlocking your business voice: “VOCATION – my new role requires me to contribute to strategic and therefore potentially ambiguous conversations,…

Review – Die Kunst, ein Egoist zu sein (The Art of Being an Egotist)
Review / April 7, 2017

Review I try to review only books that were published in english, but I got this one for cheap and did not notice its language constraints until after I read it. So I thought, whatever. If the book had an english title it would be something along “The Art of Being an Egotist”. Enjoy. The phrase “egotist” is usually understood as an insult. Kirschner tries to put a positive spin on the word, defining it as a person who understands their own needs and capabilities and tries to gain maximum pleasure within this frame. This is an interesting parallel to the latest philosophical fad, modern stoicism. The difference is, that Kirschner does not prescribe a static ideal lifestyle to reach, but instead encourages the reader to evaluate and choose their goals. According to the author, everybody is an egotist anyway, but most people suppress their nature to please others. To the author, an egotist is taking responsibility for their actions and behaviors. Kirschner wants us to evaluate what we do for ourselves versus what we do for others. Do we pursue the career we want, or the career others want us to have? Do we buy luxury goods because we…

Review – The Dictator’s Handbook
Review / February 28, 2017

Review There is a difference between the way the world is and the way the world should be. And there are reasons for this gap. Poverty, corruption and inequality all over the world can be explained by the number of people the country’s leader needs to keep power – the essential selectorate. Leaders will do everything to please their essentials, while simultaneously keep the number of essentials as low as possible. This book is a deeply cynical manifest praising the virtues of selfish, near-sighted politics. The Dictator’s Handbook starts with a bold premise: there is no functional difference between successful dictators and successful democratic leaders. The optimal strategy for both is to install policies that benefit the people they depend on, and take for themselves what is left. Both types of leaders can exercise the same corruption and reckless focus on personal gain, with the only difference being the number of people they are accountable to, their essential coalition. This point spans the entire book, being repeated ad nauseam. Democrats have to please the fraction of all voters that is necessary to elect them to power. Depending on the number of parties, faction structure and voting system this can be…

Review – Phishing for Phools
Review / February 7, 2017

Review Apparently, a good portion of current economic theories and models are based on an idealized model of the free market, where consumers and companies have access to complete market information and only make rational decisions. As a scientist, I believe that models should describe reality in a simplified manner. Models can contain a fair amount of idealization (physicists have their pockets full of infinite rods and frictionless springs), but they are only useful if they allow predictions that can be verified in empirically. So let’s get back to the free market and look if everybody is rational and informed. Have you ever bought something you immediately regretted buying? Have you ever bought something and then found it cheaper somewhere else literally five minutes later? I did. How shocking! Sometimes, new paradigms of economic theory seem banal for normal people: we are paying too much for everything, because companies manipulate our information and desires, a process the authors refer to as “phishing”. Airport food is stupidly expensive, because we feel hungry after a long flight (or a long wait for the flight) and have no time to compare all alternatives. The same psychology made some savvy financial players make up…

Review – How to Win Friends and Influence People
Review / February 7, 2017

Review When a book is attributed as an influence by famous and infamous people, and continues to sell this well, we can assume, that there is something to it. But how can a book this ancient  be relevant today? Carnegie tries to answer the age-old question of human interaction: how can I get the other person to do what I want? “How to make friends…” is written as a workbook with four major topics (basic techniques, how to make people like you, convincing people, be a leader), each one presented as a series of short lectures. At a glance, the lessons are simplistic, and always iterating on the central themes: make other people feel important, understood and respected. If you look closer, however, then you see that this is all you actually need. Find out what your counterpart wants and needs to feel good, then give it to them and they will reciprocate. People like to create their own narratives, and you will win them by giving them the opportunity to be the hero of the story. This is the fundamental trick to improve all your human interactions, that stays valid in the digital age, maybe even more. As communication…