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Reframe Your Strategy to Avoid Hidden Biases

Harvard Business Review

These biases arise from what Kahneman and his long-time research partner Amos Tversky call framing. One example is casting the challenge for strategy as defeating competitors — the perennial use of warfare, martial arts, and chess analogies being one expression. The result? These will often be the ones that appeal less.

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The Planning Fallacy and the Innovator's Dilemma

Harvard Business Review

The basic concept , first presented by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his partner Amos Tversky in an influential 1979 paper, is that human beings are astonishingly bad at estimating how long it will take to complete tasks. Do we need to increase the amount of resources (both human and financial) we are investing in growth?

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What I Didn’t Know About Becoming a CEO

Harvard Business Review

Of course, I love whenever we outperform our benchmark or peer group, but the pain of underperforming is much more painful than the pleasure of winning the same amount, a phenomenon studied at length by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. And I was startled to learn how much my attitude still sets a tone around the office.

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The F-35 and the Tradeoff Fallacy

Harvard Business Review

Thanks to a strategy known as 'concurrency,'" according to NPR, "the F-35 is being flown and tested at the same time. Then there's the testing. Concurrency was supposed to speed up the F-35's development. But the jet is years late." Up until they realized they had never done anything like that before did the real worries set in.

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Why Companies Are Betting Against Big Ideas

Harvard Business Review

This idea of prospect theory, developed by Tversky and Kahneman and reported in a classic 1979 article (for which the Nobel prize was awarded) demonstrated that individuals do not make decisions rationally by selecting options with the highest expected value, because they are risk-averse and 'losses loom larger than gains.'.

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Instinct Can Beat Analytical Thinking

Harvard Business Review

This popular triumph of the “ heuristics and biases ” literature pioneered by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has made us aware of flaws that economics long glossed over, and led to interesting innovations in retirement planning and government policy. That’s a good strategy if you have a business in a very stable world.