Kahneman on “Noise”

Daniel Kahneman is surely one of the world’s nimblest thinkers. In 2002 he shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, a neat trick for a psychologist who claims he never so much as sat in on an economics course. He has also made valuable contributions to the field of management, and I suspect he didn’t do a lot of classwork in that area either. Kahneman has cowritten a couple of articles for Harvard Business Review—on how teams can make better decisions by identifying and reducing the biases that inevitably pop up in their thinking, and on how delusional optimism can lead executives to choose the wrong strategic path.