Winning takes many forms. For fans of Matthew Syed, this is a great sports book about leadership, judgement and decision-making - rooted in the theory that helped Ed Smith lead England cricket to sustained success. And to help us all win more. 'An absolutely fascinating book' THE GAME, The Times football pod How do you spot the opportunities that others miss? How do you turn a team's performance around? How do you make good decisions amid a tidal wave of information? And how can you improve? As chief selector for the England cricket team, Ed Smith pioneered new methods for building successful teams and watched his decisions tested in real time on the pitch. During his three-year tenure, England averaged 7 wins in every 10 completed matches, better than they have performed before or since. Making Decisions reveals Smith's unique approach to finding success in a fast-changing and increasingly data-reliant world. The best decisions, Smith argues, rely on a combination of differing kinds of intelligence: from algorithms to intuition. This is a truth that the most successful people know: data cannot account for everything, it must be harnessed with human insight. Whatever the power of data, humans aren't finished yet. Sharing for the first time the tools he introduced as England selector, Smith's book captures the immediacy of life at the sharp end, while also exploring frameworks from the top levels of sports, business and the arts. Decision-making is revealed as a creative enterprise, not a reductive system. Making Decisions offers an invaluable guide for those who want a better framework for developing, explaining and implementing new ideas.

The greatest challenge we face in dealing with the complexity of our world? To think again and to think better. In a world that challenges us with ever more complicated problems, the quality of our thinking is a critical game-changer. As individuals, organisations, societies, and cultures, we need to cultivate thinking that is both insightful and farsighted. We must learn how to mobilise and apply intelligence that goes beyond the ordinary - one that continuously exceeds its own limits. The Postgraduate School of Thinking, at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels (VUB), is an experimental program with the mission of challenging us all to achieve just that. Deploying an innovative combination of mobilisation methods, the program sets out to define the cognitive strategies, practices, and habits that are the marks of exceptional thinkers. This book features a variety of interdisciplinary research articles and discussions that invite us to explore our capacity for extraordinary thinking.

In mainstream economics, and particularly in New Keynesian macroeconomics, the booms and busts that characterize capitalism arise because of large external shocks. The combination of these shocks and the slow adjustments of wages and prices by rational agents leads to cyclical movements. In this book, Paul De Grauwe argues for a different macroeconomics model--one that works with an internal explanation of the business cycle and factors in agents' limited cognitive abilities. By creating a behavioral model that is not dependent on the prevailing concept of rationality, De Grauwe is better able to explain the fluctuations of economic activity that are an endemic feature of market economies. This new approach illustrates a richer macroeconomic dynamic that provides for a better understanding of fluctuations in output and inflation.

De Grauwe shows that the behavioral model is driven by self-fulfilling waves of optimism and pessimism, or animal spirits. Booms and busts in economic activity are therefore natural outcomes of a behavioral model. The author uses this to analyze central issues in monetary policies, such as output stabilization, before extending his investigation into asset markets and more sophisticated forecasting rules. He also examines how well the theoretical predictions of the behavioral model perform when confronted with empirical data. Develops a behavioral macroeconomic model that assumes agents have limited cognitive abilities Shows how booms and busts are characteristic of market economies Explores the larger role of the central bank in the behavioral model Examines the destabilizing aspects of asset markets

Whilst a great deal of progress has been made in recent decades, concerns persist about the course of the social sciences. Progress in these disciplines is hard to assess and core scientific goals such as discovery, transparency, reproducibility, and cumulation remain frustratingly out of reach. Despite having technical acumen and an array tools at their disposal, today's social scientists may be only slightly better equipped to vanquish error and construct an edifice of truth than their forbears - who conducted analyses with slide rules and wrote up results with typewriters. This volume considers the challenges facing the social sciences, as well as possible solutions. In doing so, we adopt a systemic view of the subject matter. What are the rules and norms governing behavior in the social sciences? What kinds of research, and which sorts of researcher, succeed and fail under the current system? In what ways does this incentive structure serve, or subvert, the goal of scientific progress?

This innovative textbook makes the tools and applications of game theory and strategic reasoning both fascinating and easy to understand. Each chapter focuses a specific strategic situation as a way of introducing core concepts informally at first, then more fully, with a minimum of mathematics. At the heart of the book is a diverse collection of strategic scenarios, not only from business and politics, but from history, fiction, sports, and everyday life as well. With this approach, students don't just learn clever answers to puzzles, but instead acquire genuine insights into human behaviour. Written for major courses in economics, business, political science, and international relations, this textbook is accessible to students across the undergraduate spectrum.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to decision-making in an MCDM framework. Designed as a tutorial, it presents the main concepts and methods to be applied, together with essential background information. This includes the concept of nondominance, Simon's bounded rationality, Tversky and Kahneman's prospect theory, and the concepts of behavioral vs. mathematical convergence and premature stopping put forward by Korhonen, Moskowitz and Wallenius. The book concludes with a non-technical review of many popular decision algorithms, including the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), VIMDA, and a number of classic interactive man-machine algorithms. In essence, the book is a "one-stop" source on everything you need to know about managerial decision-making in the multiple-criteria setting.