Smartcuts by Shane Snow

While fairly readable, this is basically a Cal-Newport-style hacking book: he sees his perspective and doesn't really explore where and how it can fail.

For example, in his section on riding-the-wave, he says good surfers spend time watching and learn the waves. It's also really important to spend time riding the waves, i.e. in the classic fish-or-cut-bait dichotomy, it's important to do both.

Left completely unsaid is that you have to be ready for the wave. While some people are just wired that way, the rest of us need to architect our lives so that it's not only possible, it's also likely.

This makes Choice Architecture a key smartcut. Only you have to read other books to get that.

In seven seconds, the pit crew tore off four tires, filled a tank of gas, screwed on four new tires, and leapt out of the way for the car to scream back onto the track. Working as if controlled by a hive mind, the Formula 1 crews made the GOSH staff look like monkeys fighting over ventilator tubes.

They called the results a paradox of failure. It turns out that the surgeons who botched the new procedure tended to do worse in subsequent surgeries. Rather than learning from their mistakes, their success rates continuously declined. On the other hand, when surgeons did well on the new surgery, more successes tended to follow. Just like the startups in the Compass and Harvard studies. But whats really interesting is what happened to the surgeons who saw their colleagues fail at the new CABG procedure. These showed significant increases in their own success rates with every failure that they saw another doctor experience. Further perplexing, however: seeing a colleague perform a successful surgery didnt seem to translate to ones own future success.

While building its content backlog, Oreo managed to get its tweet approval process down to a few minutes timejust enough time to say, You can still dunk in the dark before the Superdome lights came back onand to grow a following among consumers and press that could kick-start momentum when the company needed it. And that is what won 360i its Cannes and Clios.