MDM Alumni Learning Links

Welcome to the web-site for Tuck MDM alumni, dedicated to enhancing the continuing understanding of how to think about and how to improve our decision making expertise.

What I propose at this site is to offer readings and insights that will be invaluable to busy professionals.  They will mostly be links to recent articles or my recommendations for books that have relevance to the topics of MDM.  Alternatively, they will just be plain interesting and relevant for the educated business manager.  If you have suggestions for topics or readings, I would love to hear from you, email Kent.Womack@Dartmouth.Edu. 

From time to time (infrequently, each half year?), I will email those alumni interested in knowing that there are new links. Please let Robin.Emmerton@Dartmouth.Edu  know if you would like your email to be added, edited, or deleted from the alumni mailing list.  If you find that any of the links below disappears or you have trouble with them, please let Robin know.

First of all, for those of you interested in a refresher of MDM course material, I have constructed an Amazon Decision Making Bookshelf list which includes texts that have been used in the past for courses like MDM and some generally all-around good books.  I have annotated the list with my (hopefully) unbiased opinions and "star" ratings.  Second, the readings below may require that you have Adobe PDF Reader, available for free at Adobe's web-site: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html 

Volume 1: Readings of Decision Making Interest: 2002: 

1. The Odds of That: Sunday New York Times Magazine, August 11, 2002, by Lisa Belkin. (30-45 minutes) Have you ever thought that happenings were too weird, that the coincidence of meeting your best friend from high school in the airport in Singapore was one-in-a-million?  Read this one, you need to rethink your thinking about coincidences..

Quiz: and so, what are the odds of this?  by the way, there is a correct answer . . . 

2. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2002.  We read one of Danny's many insightful works, Timid Choices and Bold Forecasts, A Cognitive Perspective on Risk Taking, in Management Science, Jan. 1993, pp. 17-31, where I believe I predicted he would be a likely Nobel laureate. (Remember the INSIDE VS> OUTSIDE VIEW?)  Here is the (expanded) announcement explaining the Nobel committee's decision (25 pages, 30 minutes to skim).

3. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, (Amazon link) by Daniel L. Schacter, Chair of Harvard University's Department of Psychology.  (A book, available many places, in hardback or paperback, 272 pages, 5-6 hours?) Maybe this is a mid-forties kind of thing, but more and more often, I see a face of someone I know well but I can't remember their name ("blocking"), or forget something 1 minute after someone has told it to me ("transience").  Remember the availability heuristic?  This book gives real insight into what becomes unavailable to us because we forget.  It is not a "how to be a better rememberer" kind of book, but a clear and really intelligent and accessible primer on the cognitive psychology of memory.  One of the best fodder-for-cocktail-parties books I know of.  At least you'll understand the oncoming senility that apparently starts in the 40s. 

4. Understanding Enron: It's About the Gatekeepers, Stupid:  a working paper by Columbia  Law School Professor John C. Coffee. (25 doubles spaced pages, about 30 minutes) It seems to me that this is one of the better articulate and non-technical analyses of the changing agency problems of auditors, investment banking analysts, and (for Professor Coffee's crowd,) attorneys.  Non-lawyers might want to omit pages 25-27.

Abstract:
Debacles of historic dimensions tend to produce an excess of explanations. So has it been with Enron, as virtually every commentator has a different diagnosis and a different prescription. Yet, in most respects, Enron is a maddeningly idiosyncratic example of pathological corporate governance, which by itself cannot provide evidence of systematic governance failure. Properly understood, however, the Enron debacle furnishes a paradigm of "gatekeeper failure" - that is, of why and when reliance may not be justified on "reputational intermediaries," such as auditors, securities analysts, attorneys, and other professionals who pledge their reputational capital to vouch for information that investors cannot easily verify. This comment shows that, during the 1990's, the expected liability costs associated with gatekeeper acquiescence in managerial misbehavior went down, while the expected benefits went up - with the unsurprising result that earnings restatements and earnings management increased. Diagnosing the circumstances under which "gatekeeper failure" is likely leads in turn to prescriptions focused on re-aligning the incentives of gatekeepers with those of investors.

5.  Finally, from the "memories" department, Andrea Guthrie was the big 2001 winner in the creativity day contests, but no one has yet beaten the professor . . .