Dex's Book Review:Blunder

The adage "Do not judge a book by its cover" certainly holds true for this wonderfully well written and researched book by Zachary Shore, an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and a senior fellow at UC Berkely's Institute of European Studies.

Have we ever wonder why smart and powerful people make bad  decisions and ultimately lead them to commit blunders? Shore demonstrate how rigid thinking can lead us to undermine ourselves. In this book, he has listed several reasons  which we human so readily get caught in these cognition traps. 

This book will certainly makes you reflect on the mistakes that you have made and you begin to understand how these cognition traps affect decisions making.

We all make bad decisions simply because we are human.The resulting mistakes can be valuable but are we ready to learn from them?

The following are the seven cognition traps, insidious yet avoidable mind-sets:

• Exposure Anxiety: fear of being seen as weak

• Causefusion: confusing the causes of complex events

• Flat View: seeing the world in one dimension

• Cure-Allism: thinking that one size solutions can solve all problems

• Informania: an obsessive relationship to information

• Mirror Imaging: thinking the other side thinks like you do

• Static Cling: the refusal to accept that circumstances have changed

With each cognition trap, examples are drawn from history,politics,business,health care and popular culture to illustrate the profound impact blunders can have.

And as you read and go along with the flow of the examples,one can immerse oneself into thinking how these cognition traps affect our daily lives whether at home or in the work place and how it can help us all make wiser judgments.

Overall rating:9/10