Perhaps the greatest lesson from Warren Buffet’s most recent letter to Berkshire shareholders is that, to be wildly successful, you only have to be right sometimes: In 58 years of Berkshire management, most of my capital-allocation decisions have been no better than so-so. In some… Read More
I have heard a number of people describe this blog as covering all that is new. That wasn’t my explicit goal when I started writing it. My goal was simply to focus on cities and all the wonderful things that shape them. But it turns… Read More
In life and business I find that we are often faced with decisions that pit emotion against rationality. What I mean by this is that maybe your ego is telling you to do something. And maybe, as a matter of principle, you know with certainty… Read More
I very much enjoyed Ben Horowitz’s last book called, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. In fact, five years later, I still find myself going back to it in my mind, particularly the bits about high quality decision making. So I am looking forward to… Read More
Perhaps for obvious reasons, I am interested in how important issues get debated. I have written before about how I think the community engagement process for new developments is largely broken. I think it naturally incents certain kinds of feedback. Recently, I’ve been playing around… Read More
This is not new. It has been reported on before. But I just finished reading this article about Jeff Bezos’ relentless commitment to “high-quality and high-velocity decision making” at Amazon. Here are a couple of high level points: – There are decisions that cannot be easily… Read More
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a book that I read a number of years ago (Amazon just told me that I purchased it on March 12, 2014), but that I frequently come back to in my mind. One of my favorite themes in… Read More
I’m listening to the below podcast right now with Sonal Chokshi, Chris Dixon, and Steven Johnson. Steven recently published a new book called, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter Most. If you can’t see the embedded podcast below, click here. It is about the big… Read More
In 1988, William Samuelson (Boston University) and Richard Zeckhauser (Harvard University) published a seminal paper called, Status Quo Bias in Decision Making. In one of the experiments cited in the paper, two groups of people are given a hypothetical task that involves picking from a… Read More
A few days ago, Seth Godin published a terrific blog post called the rationality paradox. It’s not very long (like most of his posts) and I like it a lot (particularly the bold part), and so I’m reblogging it in full here: If you see yourself… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 