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Rock Breaks Scissors
Book

Rock Breaks Scissors

A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody

Little, Brown US, 2014 подробнее...


Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Being a mind reader gives you a competitive advantage: You can anticipate your competitors’ strategic moves or predict consumer desires. To gain this advantage, improve your skill at predicting people’s random behavior. Author William Poundstone teaches that while people strive to be spontaneous, they actually base their choices on unconscious patterns. Learn these patterns and you can uncover their game plans. Poundstone shows how to detect patterns in a wide range of settings, including sports, games and investing. He offers fascinating and potentially useful insights into the human bias toward order. Unfortunately, Poundstone provides too little guidance for applying these techniques in business settings. For example, he lacks a chapter on how these tactics can affect negotiation. Nevertheless, getAbstract believes his observations on human psychology make his insights and tactics valuable to salespeople, marketers, strategists and investors.

Take-Aways

  • The key to unpredictability is randomness – the absence of a pattern.
  • Humans are bad at recognizing or creating random sequences.
  • People’s strategic choices often follow unconscious but predictable patterns.

About the Author

William Poundstone’s 14 books include Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? and How Would You Move Mount Fuji? He has written for The New York Times, Harper’s and the Harvard Business Review.


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    T. T. 9 years ago
    Did it help me to profit by predicting your competitors’ strategic choices ? After the reading, I still don't understand how to predict ...
    • Avatar
      9 years ago
      Strangely, I predicted that you would ask that question...

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