Sitting With Uncertainty

Even a successful, long-lasting business can be undone by a harmful workplace culture. If a company fails to trust its employees, focuses on blame instead of solving problems, and drowns every decision in a sea of red tape, its rivals will outpace it in the market. In The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim presents a fictional case study of a business that falls behind its competitors because of its soul-crushing work conditions, leading a band of rebellious employees to figure out a new, more productive way of working.

In this guide, we’ll look at Kim’s diagnosis of the problems that exist in a toxic workplace, as well as the changes he recommends to foster creativity and productivity. We’ll discuss how Kim’s themes align with those of other business experts, and because Kim demonstrates his ideas through fiction, we’ll direct you to other nonfiction works in which his core concepts are fully explained.

Every day, you make predictions, like when traffic will be heaviest on your route to work or whether the value of a company’s stock will increase or decrease. We use the information from these predictions to guide our decisions. But how can we ensure that we’re making the best predictions possible?

In Superforecasting, authors Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner explore that question by analyzing the strategies of 'superforecasters,' volunteer analysts who predict the likelihood of global events with impressive accuracy. In this guide, we’ll explore the traits and tactics that make superforecasters so “super” and how you can use them to improve your own predictions. We’ll also compare the authors’ approach to predicting the future to those of other influential thinkers like Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Never Split the Difference aims to provide a comprehensive guide to negotiating theory and strategy, giving you the tools you need to negotiate successfully. Voss’s thesis is that good negotiation happens on the emotional level of the brain, not the rational level. Your job as a negotiator, Voss argues, is to practice and display empathy toward your counterpart by understanding their emotions, learning to see the situation from their point of view—and, ultimately, getting them to feel comfortable enough with you to let their emotional guard down.

In this guide, we’ve supplemented Voss’s ideas with findings from outside research and incorporated insights from other key negotiation texts—like Roger Fisher and William Ury’s Getting to Yes and Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation—to give readers a more balanced and nuanced perspective on negotiation and evaluate how Voss’s findings square with those of other acknowledged experts on the field.

This book answers the simple but essential question: Why can’t we all get along?

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains why people around the world, including liberals and conservatives in the United States, have different moral frameworks. He argues that moral judgments are emotional, not logical—they are based on stories rather than reason. Consequently, liberals and conservatives lack a common language, and reason-based arguments about morality are ineffective. This leads to political polarization.

The Righteous Mind explores how our divergent moralities evolved, why morality is about more than just fairness, and how we can counter our natural self-righteousness to decrease political divides.

Defining creativity has historically been challenging because creatives are often walking contradictions—they’re introverted yet outgoing, focused yet easily distracted, and sensitive yet resilient. According to Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, this is because creativity isn’t a characteristic itself, but rather the effect of a collection of different characteristics.

The authors’ research shows that creative people are ultimately defined by their introspection, desire for learning and experiences, unconventional and fantastical thinking, and search for meaning. In Wired to Create, the authors say that creatives possess 10 characteristics that encompass these traits and result in their heightened creativity—by embracing these characteristics, you too can maximize your creative potential.

In this guide, we’ll explore Kaufman and Gregoire’s 10 creativity characteristics, explaining how they manifest and why they enhance creativity. In our commentary, we’ll supplement the authors’ discussion with information from other experts and books on creativity and well-being like The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and That Little Voice In Your Head by Mo Gawdat.

In an increasingly globalized world, we’re more likely to encounter people from other cultures than ever before. This diversity allows for creativity and innovation—but it can also be incredibly confusing. Why doesn't your Japanese colleague ever say what they mean? How come you’re the only person to arrive on time at a meeting in Nigeria?

In The Culture Map, cultural communications expert Erin Meyer presents a framework you can use to analyze how cultures differ from yours as well as practical strategies to mitigate any cultural misunderstandings. She also explains why these cultural differences developed in the first place.

In this guide, we’ll discuss these differences, Meyer’s strategies, and her explanations for how these cultural differences developed. We’ll also supplement Meyer’s ideas with external research—so you can understand exactly how cultural differences affect people and have the studies to back it up.

We usually think of snap judgments as lazy, superficial, and probably wrong. But are they really? In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argues that snap judgments can be just as good as—or even better than—the decisions that we make when we analyze a situation carefully. Blink delves into how and why we make the gut decisions we do, when it’s unsafe to trust our guts, and what we can do to make all our snap judgments smarter, less biased, and more efficient.

In this guide, we add some structure to Gladwell’s arguments and update the research he draws on, looking at how snap judgments might work in the brain. We also give you some additional strategies for maximizing the accuracy of your snap judgments.

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari uses concepts from biology, history, and economics to tell the story of us, Homo sapiens. We start 2.5 million years ago, when Sapiens make their historical entrance, and end in the future, when the creation of an artificially created superhuman race may mark the end of the Sapiens species. Along the way, we learn how our ability to create imagined realities led to our dominance over other species. We watch as the Agricultural Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, imperialism, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution change our species in lasting, and not always positive, ways.

Ultimately, we’re left with one question: As we design our future, who do we want to become? Asking the right questions may be more important than finding the right answers. Read this summary to explore our history as a species—in doing so, you’ll see today’s world in an entirely new way.

The 21st century will bring changes and challenges unlike any humans have encountered before. Globalism and technological innovations are changing the structures of societies worldwide—and the changes are happening quickly. If people don’t face these challenges and help shape the future, the world could have a class of obsolete workers whose jobs have been automated and people could lose their ability to make their own decisions. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari highlights the biggest challenges in the modern world, and he offers advice on making sense of and navigating such transitional times.

In this summary, you'll learn how algorithms like Netflix movie recommendations are teaching you to distrust your own judgment, why religion can’t solve 21st-century challenges, and how automation will threaten the jobs of humans in every industry.