Learning Journal

Book review

The first concept that I found extremely interesting is the mistaken idea that only specific things can be measured. This is the first concept discussed, and an idea the has direct application in my current job. Where I’m at, my company is rapidly growing. They rate of expansion has out paced our processes, and as a result, we have lots of frustrated employees that are constantly quitting. With only 720 employees, we had at least one person quit almost every day this month. So, as the person who’s in charge of organizational development, I’m tasked with trying to find ways to change things. I find this a very frustrating proposition, since we can’t say exactly which things are a problem, and of those we would guess at, we can’t say which one’s are the most important to fix. The general idea is that we simply can not measure employee happiness on some key points, so there’s no sense trying at all. I think it’s an important point to say that we can’t know to pin point accuracy, but knowing something reduces our ambiguity, so therefore there is value in trying to find that out. (Chapter 1)

Next, I liked the idea of ranges of certainty. There was a list of five things that you could do to try and narrow the range, but the one that I liked the best was where you pick something ridiculous, and then narrow it down to something more likely to be correct. Like the concept first mentioned, this idea could give us a general idea of how people really feel about their job. Based on exit interviews, if we were to read them, I could make the statement that all pilots hated their schedule, and have one of the executives counter back with a number closer to what they really thought was more likely. I also liked the idea of pretending to bet, for if it takes money to bet more accurately, then it definitely should be used. After all, isn’t that what business is about anyway? (Chapter 2)

With this, there is also Expected Opportunity lost. I really like...