Tag Archives: The Art of Decision Making

Investing in companies such as Facebook before they went public has proven very lucrative for many well-connected investors – and Facebook’s decision to stay private for eight years before going public certainly worked out well for the social media giant. Bill Gurley, a general partner at venture capital firm Benchmark Capital, believes that early success stories such as Facebook and many other high-flying technology companies have made it fashionable for CEOs to resist public offerings....

Baseball has always been a statistics-driven game. In 2002, however, the Oakland Athletics, led by then-Assistant Manager Paul DePodesta and General Manager Billy Beane, pioneered a completely new approach to analyzing player data that helped a team with one of the lowest payrolls in the league win 103 games. Most recently the vice president of player development for the New York Mets, in January 2016, DePodesta didn’t just switch teams—he switched sports, becoming chief strategy officer of...

No one is right all the time, but one can learn to be wrong less often. Watch Michael Mauboussin, Credit Suisse’s Head of Global Financial Strategies, explain how overcoming naïve realism and questioning the status quo can help leaders of all kinds make better choices. He discussed the above and more at the 2016 Thought Leader Forum.    

Do you trust software to make decisions for you? Would you trust it if you’d written the software yourself? Consider the case of Cade Massey, a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Rufus Peabody, a former student and professional sports gambler. Together, the two men have built a well-known system for predicting the outcomes of college and professional football games known as the Massey-Peabody rankings. Their picks rely purely on statistics – except the one day they...