Review: The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes

The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes by David Robson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: A break down of Intelligence bias when you are too smart for your own good.

Sharing ample examples of intelligent people like Conan Doyle - the man who created Sherlock Holmes believing in the fairies hoax to companies with the subject matter experts and pioneers falling short when it mattered most. Implicit to all of these are biases , usually cognitive and the fact that smarter people find creative ways to justify it to themselves. Like the copy pasta influencer quote - people half as smart as you are achieving 10x more because they aren't smart enough to see why can't ."

From how organisations shut down feedback mechanisms because everyone is smart enough to do no wrong to the propagation of fake news, there are some narratives that add value to the book. Otherwise yet another self help book.

The concept that having more than 60% of your team being all star can actually be detrimental and 60% is a sweet spot using some cherry picked examples from American sports. Similarly, making learning tough makes it more sticky especially with context switching - probably why our academic schedule works around periods of 40-45 minutes with topics changing and concept of revision.

Also how near misses creep into the safe operating procedure rulebooks and capturing that info could also help prevent disastrous results when we wonder why something worked fine 5 times and went horribly wrong the 6th even though we did the same thing. The author ties up all the points with cherry picked real world examples.

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Review: I Came Upon a Lighthouse: A Short Memoir Of Life With Ratan Tata

I Came Upon a Lighthouse: A Short Memoir Of Life With Ratan Tata by Shantanu Naidu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: A memoir on interacting with Ratan Tata - the friend rather than the business tycoon.

Everyone has heard of Shantanu especially after Humans of Bombay did a piece on how this GenZ is Ratan Tata's best friend through their love of animals. Shantanu takes it a step further sharing his background and how he met Ratan and how their friendship blossomed , whilst he shared his guarded apprehensions of meeting a tycoon who is worshipped in his fifth generation Tata family.

Light, heart warming and a unique perspective about Ratan Tata as a friend rather than the professional successful tycoon we usually read of. The book is a breezy read in comfortable language like a warm blanket of a cold night.

Rather than a chronological order of events for the history book, it focusses more on the relationship like any two friends - just that one friend is the Ratan Tata.

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