Rating

★★★★★

Category

non-fiction

Read

2022-11-20

Pages

232

Surprisingly good and interesting, helped fine tune my metrics bullshit detector. Pretty much all business studies are compromised by relying on articles from popular press and retrospective employee interviews, both of which are unduly affected by a halo effect (if company was doing well, then everything else about the company was good too … and the opposite.)

Winners are confident, losers are arrogant.

Once people—whether outside observers or participants—believe the outcome is good, they tend to make positive attributions about the decision process; and when they believe the outcome is poor, they tend to make negative attributions.

By 2002—just as its inventory turns were reaching an all-time high!—Kmart hoisted the white flag and shuffled off to bankruptcy court. It’s irresistible to infer that a bankrupt company must have been poor at execution, but the evidence doesn’t support that view at all, at least not if we’re talking about execution in an absolute sense.

Thanks Jack for recommendation.