Earlier this year, a prominent friend of mine was tasked with coming up with a list of behavioral economics book recommendations for the military leaders of a G7 country and I was on the limited email list asking for input.
Yikes.
While I read a lot and I’ve offered up books to sports teams and fortune 100 management teams, I’ve never contributed to something as broad as educating a nation’s military leaders. While I have a huge behavorial economics reading list, this wasn’t where I started.
Not only did I want to contribute, but I wanted to choose books that these military leaders wouldn’t normally have come across in everyday life. Books they were unlikely to have read. Books that offered perspective.
Given that I couldn’t talk to them outright, I was really trying to answer the question ‘what would I like to communicate to military leaders through non-fiction books?’ There were no easy answers.
I needed to offer something timeless. Not so outside the box that they wouldn’t approach it, and not so hard to find that those purchasing the books would give up and move on to the next one on the list. And it can’t be so big they get intimidated by the commitment to read. On top of that, you need a book that starts strong because, in my experience of dealing with C-level executives, they stop paying attention after about 20 pages if it’s not relevant or challenging them in the right way.
In short there is no one-size-fits-all but to make the biggest impact you have to consider all of these factors.
While the justifications for why people chose the books below are confidential, I can tell you what books were on the final email that I saw. I left one book off the list, which I thought was a little too controversial to post.
These books have nothing to do with military per se, rather they deal with enduring concepts like ecology, intuition, game theory, strategy, biology, second order thinking, and behavioral psychology. In short these books would benefit most people who want to improve their ability to think, which is why I’m sharing them with you.
If you’re so inclined you can try to guess which ones I recommended in the comments. Read wisely.
In no order and with no attribution:
- Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions by Gerd Gigerenzer
- The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
- The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank
- David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
- Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Trivers
- The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust by John Coates
- Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford
- The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant
- Poor Charlie’s Almanack
- Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions by Robert H. Frank
- The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail–but Some Don’t by Nate Silver
- Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jetha
- The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley
- Introducing Evolutionary Psychology by Dylan Evans & Oscar Zarate
- Filters Against Folly: How To Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent by Garrett Hardin
- Games of Strategy (Fourth Edition) by Avinash Dixit, Susan Skeath & David H. Reiley, Jr.
- The Theory of Political Coalitions by William H. Riker
- The Evolution of War and its Cognitive Foundations (PDF) by John Tooby & Leda Cosmides.
- Fight the Power: Lanchester’s Laws of Combat in Human Evolution by Dominic D.P. Johnson & Niall J. MacKay.