The new economics

What Hacker News says

1. kqrSep 2024
   A bit unconventional, but I think Wheeler's Understanding Variation followed by Deming's A New Economics teach people how to interpret past and future in a way that makes both exploration and exploitation more effective.

   I would not want to go through life not having read those -- much less run an early-stage company!

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2. kqrAug 2024
   I second both The Signal and the Noise as well as How to Measure Anything. I also mentioned upthread Willful Ignorance.

   I think perhaps the best bang for your buck could be Wheeler's Understanding Variation -- but that is based mainly on vague memory and skimming the table of contents. I plan on writing a proper review of that book in the coming year to make certain it is what I remember it to be.

   I think the earlier works by Taleb also touch on this (Fooled by Randomness seems to have it in the title).

   But then I strongly recommend branching out to places where these fundamentals are used, to cement them:

   - Anything popular by Deming (e.g. The New Economics)

   - Anything less popular by Deming (e.g. Some Theory of Sampling)

   - Moneyball

   - Theory of Probability (de Finetti)

   - Causality (Pearl)

   - Applied Survival Analysis

   - Analysis of Extremal Events

   - Regression Modeling with Actuarial and Financial Applications

   The more theoretical and applied books are less casual reads, obviously. They also happen to be the directions in which I have gone -- you may have more luck picking your own direction for where to apply and practice your intuition.

   Edit: Oh and while I don't have a specific book recommendation because none of the ones I read I have good opinions on, something on combinatorics helps with getting a grasp on the general smell of entropy and simpler problems like Monty Hall.

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3. gortokJun 2024
   The study isn't shared, so we can't see the methodology to determine its accuracy. We see the results of the survey; but that's not a study, and the survey itself isn't shared with us.

   I don't dispute that agile has its issues -- and I'd be surprised if 'agile' failure rates weren't an issue. We can empirically see the result of 25 years of 'agile', and it's not somewhere we should aspire to be.

   The issues comes down to this:

   1. Is adopting an 'agile' methodology sufficient to ensure (insert goal here)? 2. Has the software industry adopted a method of operating that creates a statistical quality control; and adopted practices that investigate and remediate special causes and common causes of variation in quality?

   To spoil it: for #1 the answer is 'no', and for #2 the answer is a resounding 'no'.

   There are practices that are ingredients to the world described in #2, but we as an industry have not yet adopted a systematic way of thinking and resolving problems in the software development process.

   I think we'd be better off adopting Deming's method of management and his System of Profound Knowledge and be far better off than adopting the agile fad of the week; even as I admit I still have open questions on how to apply his work to Software. (See "The New Economics" 3rd Edition, and "Out of the Crisis", both written by Deming).

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4. radiatorOct 2023
   Why don't you read some books?

   - Out of the crisis and The new economics, Deming

   - Workplace Management and Toyota Production System, Ohno

   - Peopleware, DeMarco & Lister

   - Managing the professional service firm, Meister (delegation)

   - Leadership Handbook, US Army

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5. kqrApr 2022
   Some authors take multiple books to fully flesh out the ideas outlined in the first, so there are some doubles recommended here.

   I also found it impossible to rank books, so instead I took roughly the top 20, grouped them into themes, and then ranked the themes based on how important I think they are.

   1. Deming is the primary writer of the type of management we need to be competitive: Deming, The New Economics & Out of the Crisis.

   2. There is a wide variety of ways for humans to organise. Nobody is forcing the default capitalist bureaucracy on you, so be creative: Graeber, Bullshit Jobs & Dawn of Everything & The Democracy Project.

   3. How people are motivated: Pink, Drive.

   4. How to create a high-trust, less authoritarian, open, collaborative environment within a traditional hierarchy: Marquet, Leadership is Language.

   5. Communication: Voss, Never Split the Difference. Faber, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen.

   6. How to help organisations who don't want to admit what their problem is: Weinberg, Secrets of Consulting.

   7. How to structure organisations and processes to deliver maximum value: Reinertsen, Principles of Product Development Flow. Ward, Lean Product and Process Development. Womack, Machine That Changed the World.

   8. How to innovate cheaply: Westrum, Sidewinder.

   9. How to estimate things properly: Hubbard, How to Measure Anything. Tetlock, Superforecasting. Savage, The Flaw of Averages.

   10. How to train people to be experts at things: Hoffman, Accelerated Learning.

   11. How people fail at decisions: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow & Noise.

   I had to leave out a few about statistics, causality inference, project portfolio investment that didn't make the top 20 cut.

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6. kqrMar 2022
   Either The New Economics or Out of the Crisis or both, by Deming.

   I could recommend twenty more books that I think are essential to be a good leader (in various areas like ownership, communication, continuous improvement, planning, innovation, anthropology, visual control, calibrated estimation, etc.), but Deming stands way above everything else.

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