• Home
• Blogroll
• Me, my blog and I

Heuristics, theories and models

Image via Wikipedia

Clearing out some MBA stuff and keep coming across snippets regarding models, heuristics and concepts which I want to keep for future reference. Here are some:

• theories are stable explanations for recurring phenomena
• theorising is “sense making”
• “there is nothing so practical as good theory”
• 3 stages to theorising:
  • concepts (define)
  • conceptual framework (description of connections)
  • theory

And some stuff on cognitive styles:

• Intuition - “knowing, without knowing why”
• “Truly outstanding managers are those who can couple hunch, judgement and synthesis with logic and analysis” (Henry Mintzberg)

Don’t have the money or rigid blocks of time to do an MBA? Check out this reading list “The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List” which has been knocking around for a couple of years. You’ll still need ‘time’ but with disciplined self learning you could theoretically get through the list in 1 year (77 books in total). More probable that it will take 2-5 years though…

And books I would recommend which aren’t necessarily on the list above but which touch on theories, statistics, decision making and all that stuff:

Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty Gerd Gigerenzer

Judgment in Managerial Decision Making Max Bazerman

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Levitt and Dubner

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Malcolm Gladwell

Supercrunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted Ian Ayres

and a couple I have on my reading list for my holidays next week:

Wikinomics Dan Tapscott

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.