Michael Mauboussin

Start from the share price and ask what results it expects a company to deliver.

Essays on investing philosophy, psychology, competition and science.

Eight mistakes experienced decision-makers repeat, and a correction for each.

How to separate skill from luck in business, sport and investing.

The ten attributes of successful investors: how to think well, not what to think.

Value is discounted future cash flow, not earnings per share or return on equity.

How Pixar kept a creative company working after success, and the habits it used.

Run a tech company for shareholder value by funding its core advantage.

How judging firms by their results corrupts most business research and advice.

Keeping customers, employees and investors is what drives profit and growth.

Eight CEOs who beat the market by allocating capital, not by running operations.

Insider account of Google's people operations by its SVP of HR.

Explains an action by tracing its causes back from neurons to hormones to evolution.

Behavioural genetics on how much of an outcome is inherited

The founding of the Santa Fe Institute and the people who built complexity science.

How the sciences and humanities can be unified by causal links from physics up.

Honeybee colonies as a decentralised allocation and search system

How ancient DNA has rewritten the story of human prehistory and migration.

A 20-year test of 28,000 expert forecasts: foxes with many models beat hedgehogs.

Why people mistake luck for skill, above all in markets.

The biases that distort managers' decisions, with exercises that show them.

The Good Judgment Project; the practices that measurably improve forecasts.

When groups judge better than experts, and the four conditions that make it work.

Judge decisions by their reasoning, not their outcomes, and think in odds.

Why some people survive disasters that kill others in the same circumstances.

Rewards work for routine tasks; creative work runs on autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Givers, takers and matchers, and why givers end up both at the bottom and the top.

Early specialisation works only where rules are stable; elsewhere breadth wins.

Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.

Work is splitting between those who work well with smart machines and the rest.

Living standards rise through learning, and how policy can make economies learn.

How economics copied the maths of 19th-century physics, and what that cost it.

Twenty short essays on why behaviour matters more than knowledge with money.

How people learned to measure risk, from early probability to portfolio theory.

How Jho Low diverted billions from Malaysia's 1MDB fund into parties and politics.

Five technological revolutions since 1771, and why each brings a financial bubble.

The history and revival of psychedelic research, and the author's own trips.

How checklists stop experts in complex fields failing to apply what they know.

Chronic stress and how it affects the quality of decisions.

How calculus works and how it made modern technology possible.

The tricks companies use to inflate earnings, cash flow and key metrics, by case.

Buffett's life from Omaha and Graham's class to building Berkshire Hathaway.

How Theranos reached a $9 billion value with blood tests that never worked.

How venture capital works, from fund economics to term sheets, for founders.

Steven Pinker's 500-page empirical survey of progress across 15 dimensions: health, wealth, equality, safety, knowledge, quality of life. Explicitly frames market economies and Enlightenment liberalism as the institutional sources of that progress. Has been criticized for cherry-picking metrics and underweighting catastrophic risks; the data itself is worth engaging with regardless.

How lack of sleep damages nearly every system in the body, and what sleep does.

Speeches making the case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.

Navy SEAL leadership doctrine adapted to running teams and firms

Where you direct attention just before a message shapes how it is received.

Why parents have less effect on how children turn out than people assume.

Price is the strongest profit lever and the least managed; how to set it well.

Three false beliefs taught to young Americans, and how they harm their minds.

Talent, training and genetics in elite athletic performance