University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Rock Breaks Scissors
Book

Rock Breaks Scissors

A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody

William Poundstone
Little, Brown US, 2014
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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.

Summary

The Power of Prediction

Whether you’re squaring off in a tennis match, playing poker or picking stocks, effective players guess what their opponents are going to do. In that way, prediction is a foundational skill in competition. However, you don’t need to be a mind reader to make accurate guesses. People base their behavior on unconscious patterns, even when they are aiming for spontaneity, randomness or surprise. Learn these patterns to make more accurate guesses about your opponents’ strategy.

The key to unpredictability is randomness – the absence of a pattern. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine that seeks meaning and order in any phenomenon. As a result, your brain does not do a good job of recognizing randomness and, in fact, will impose an illusory pattern on a random sequence. Because of this bias toward patterns, being truly spontaneous is hard.

Exploit this predictability to gain small advantages. For instance, when you offer customers a choice of three options, they tend to choose the middle one. Make the middle one slightly more expensive, and you’re ahead of the game. Knowledge of such patterns gives you a statistical advantage over your ...

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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