Books in Brief: July-August 2010

Edited by Rick Docksai
The Economics of Integrity: From Dairy Farmers to Toyota, How Wealth Is Built on Trust and What That Means for Our Future by Anna Bernasek. Harper. 2010. 193 pages. $19.99.

The businessman who says he created his wealth all by himself is mistaken, states financial reporter Anna Bernasek in The Economics of Integrity. She points out that any successful enterprise is the result of a number of people lending their cooperation and their time. For all these people to cooperate effectively, they must first be able to trust each other.

Bernasek affirms the fundamental role that relationships of trust play in national and global commerce. There is actually far more integrity in the world of finance than some people might assume, she says. Integrity is what makes the economy go. Without it, a future of economic prosperity will not be possible.

Bernasek cites the successes that some major businesses attained by being trustworthy, and the comparatively greater wealth that some nations attain by enforcing transparency and integrity among their national businesses. Then she describes the benefits a new business can enjoy if it counts integrity and trustworthiness among its paramount values.

The Economics of Integrity makes a sound case for moral behavior and a clear link between doing the right thing today and achieving a better future tomorrow. Entrepreneurs and students who might one day be entrepreneurs will both find it to be inspirational reading.

Global Sources of Local Pollution: An Assessment of Long-Range Transport of Key Air Pollutants to and from the United States by the National Research Council. National Academies Press. 2010. 234 pages. Paperback. $35.

The pollution that a factory emits on one continent today will impact the health of a neighborhood on another continent next week, warns the National Research Council in Global Sources of Local Pollution.

Global wind and water currents have the potential to carry smog, soot, pesticide residues, and other toxins from region to region. Within one week, they can cross an ocean. A year is all the time needed for them to completely circumnavigate the globe. Consequently, any one locale’s ecological problems are likely to become the world’s ecological problems.

The authors identify four main types of pollutants — ozone, particulate matter, mercury, and organic pollutants — the long-term health risks each one presents, and specific actions that the global community can take now to mitigate them.

With thorough research and analysis, Global Sources of Local Pollution affirms the interconnectedness of our world and the ties that bind every community within it, and points out scientifically sound ways forward toward a healthy future for all.

Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Gary Klein. MIT Press. 2009. 337 pages. $27.95.

Decision makers sometimes put their faith in logic and data when intuitive thinking would really be the better guide, says scientist Gary Klein in Streetlights and Shadows.

He notes that most adults assume that the way to plan for the future is to gather copious information about the matter at hand and carefully consider the available options. This may be true only in situations that are well-ordered and predictable. But real life is often complex, random, and prone to dramatic changes in short spans of time.

We often are pressed to make decisions without having all the information at hand, or where change is taking place rapidly and unpredictably. Trying to analyze the environment and predict what will happen next could be futile, and maybe even counterproductive.

Klein urges decision makers to alter their planning methods when they are faced with unexpected events. This means revising a lot of deeply ingrained beliefs: accepting that biases aren’t always bad, logic does not always help, gathering more information can confuse instead of clarify, and generating multiple options might do more harm than good. There are times to conduct analysis, Klein says, and there are times to let experience and intuition pinpoint the answers.

Streetlights and Shadows is a sharp assessment of planning methods and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Consultants and organization leaders may find it an insightful read.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Broadway. 2010. 305 pages. $26.

How, exactly, do you motivate people to change their behaviors? According to Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Switch, it boils down to a three-part process: reaching people’s rational minds, appealing to their emotions, and then shaping the environment to make it more conducive to change.

The authors lay out their own insights about the change process and how successful change comes about. They demonstrate their findings by presenting case-by-case examples from real life. Among the many anecdotes that they share:

• Steve Booth-Butterfield and Bill Reger, two West Virginia University health researchers, persuaded the residents of two West Virginia towns to drink more low-fat milk and less whole milk via promotional ads that contrasted unsightly images of blobs of saturated fat (which an individual ingests when he or she drinks whole milk) with appealing images of glasses of low-fat milk. After six months, sales of low-fat milk nearly doubled.

• Donald Berwick, a doctor and president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, spearheaded life-saving procedural changes within Institute-affiliated hospitals. The hospital administrators were reluctant to adopt many of them, but he won them over by setting forth specific goals and the interventions that could help achieve them. He then launched a campaign of procedural change that hospitals would join if they wanted to participate. For added effect, he brought the mother of a girl who had been killed by medical error on stage to deliver a keynote speech. Joining the campaign was easy, and every hospital that did would receive a team of researchers that would help guide it through the changes. Within the first two months, more than a thousand hospitals joined.

• Jerry Sternin, a Save the Children administrator, received an invitation from the Vietnamese government to come to the country and reduce rural malnutrition. He traveled to a rural village and sought out “bright spot” households in which children were healthier and better-nourished than their peers. Then he interviewed the bright-spot parents to find out what they were doing differently. He brought them together with other parents in cooking groups that would meet regularly to prepare well-balanced meals. Six months later, 65% of the children in the village were eating better.

Switch offers many insights about human behavior and psychology that marketing professionals, communications experts, and public-policy makers might all appreciate.

Toward Human Emergence: A Human Resource Philosophy for the Future by Philip Harris. HRD Press. 2010. 452 pages. $59.95.

The human species is transitioning toward a new, higher state of being, asserts management and space psychologist Philip Harris. The exponential acceleration of knowledge is transforming civilization itself. As the twenty-first century progresses, humans will have a series of opportunities to develop their potential.

The challenge will be for all people to widen their perspectives and be mindful of humanity’s long-term evolution. People can move beyond self-destructive and exploitative behaviors, and embrace cooperation and compassion for those less fortunate. But it will take a concerted effort. We must all personally strive to be “world shapers” rather than “earth squatters.” Harris lays out specific courses of action for both policy makers and private citizens to take.

Harris’s Toward Human Emergence is an introspective and inspirational discussion of human life. Philosophers, public officials, and the general public will all find it to be a worthy read.

2048: Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together by J. Kirk Boyd. Berrett-Koehler. 2010. 221 pages. Paperback. $15.95.

Since World War II, world leaders have initiated serious discussions about how to turn from a past of worldwide warfare and poverty to a future of global peace and prosperity for all, notes Kirk Boyd, executive director of the nonprofit 2048 Project. He argues that the goal is achievable, though it will require a written agreement for peaceable coexistence that is ratified by all countries and enforceable in all of the world’s courts.

He explains how the agreement might come to fruition by 2048: It will build off the successes of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it will follow two prior steps: education of all the world’s citizens on human rights, and then bringing the world’s leaders together to draft an international accord.

Many skeptics believe that war and poverty are inevitable and will always be realities of human life, Boyd notes. But he challenges that supposition throughout 2048 with hope for a better future and an action plan to bring it about. His book offers a lofty, but inspiring, set of goals.

The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World by William Sims Bainbridge. MIT Press. 2009. 248 pages. $27.95.

Imagine a video game bursting out of the screen and merging with the real world around you. You may experience precisely that if a prototype augmented-reality game system called LARP (live-action role-playing games) becomes fully developed, according to William Sims Bainbridge in The Warcraft Civilization.

A LARP’s playing field, Bainbridge says, would be an open-air city or park. Your view would be altered by game-generated holographs of heroes, villains, and action sequences. Gamers who now play World of Warcraft on computer screens might gather in a theme park and face off against each other in real time, disguised as warlocks, elves, orcs, and other characters.

Education might get enhancements, too. Tourists who visit Washington, D.C., and listen to a guide discuss the capital’s role in World War II might relive the era by pretending to be OSS agents or Nazi spies.

Even without LARP, however, World of Warcraft is very much present in the real world and may become more so, Bainbridge adds. In May 2008, scientists held an academic convention as avatars in the World of Warcraft domain. Also, many sociologists are experimenting with the game because of its parallels with real life. Tribes of beings interact with each other and sometimes clash. And there are functioning economic systems, complete with “black-market” transactions.

In The Warcraft Civilization, Bainbridge explores the social trend of role-playing games and their significance for contemporary culture in the years ahead. Gamers and sociologists will both find his observations informative.

Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century by Paul Milo. Harper. 2010. 288 pages. Paperback. $14.99.

Renowned twentieth-century experts made many educated guesses about what life in the early twenty-first century would be like, and many of those guesses turned out to be spectacularly wrong, notes freelance journalist Paul Milo in Your Flying Car Awaits. We’re now 10 years into the new century and have as of yet no bases on the moon, computers that think, flying cars, or any of the other marvels that scholars only three decades ago expected that we would have.

Milo reviews the leading forecasts across the twentieth century and infers what they say about their respective times — optimistic eras bred optimistic forecasts, while recession eras bore gloomy forecasts, for example. He also identifies lessons that forecasters today stand to learn from these erroneous forecasts. Forecasting is always a risky endeavor, he says. But if we determine how scholars in the past erred, we can alter our approaches to forecasting accordingly and guess the future with greater accuracy.

Your Flying Car Awaits is a light and conversational overview of forecasting through the decades, as well as a sharp evaluation of the limits to our abilities as humans to guess the future. Students of cultural history will appreciate it, as will any readers who want an approachable yet informative discussion about the discipline of making forecasts.