business-books

Mentor Me: ...the crossroads and convergence of where science, metaphysics, religion, and utopian society intersect.

It__ useful to make the distinction between reports and stories. A report is above all responsible for providing the facts, without manipulation or interpretation. Stories, on the other hand, are a way that people try to make sense of their lives and their experiences in the world. The test of a good story isn__ its responsibility to the facts as much as its ability to provide a satisfying explanation of events. In a few paragraphs, the reader learns of the problem (sales and profits are down), gets a plausible explanation (the company lost its direction), and learns a lesson (don__ stray, focus on the core). There__ a neat end with a clean resolution. No threads are left hanging. Readers go away satisfied.Now, there__ nothing wrong with stories, provided we understand that__ what we have before us. More insidious, however, are stories that are dressed up to look like science. They take the form of science and claim to have the authority of science, but they miss the real rigor and logic of science. They__e better described as pseudoscience. Richard Feynman had an even more memorable phrase: Cargo Cult Science. Here__ the way Feynman described it: In the South Seas there is a cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they__e arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas _ he__ the controller _ and they wait for the airplanes to land. They__e doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn__ work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they__e missing something essential, because the planes don__ land.That__ not to say that Cargo Cult Science doesn__ have some benefits. The folks who wait patiently by the landing strips on their tropical island, dressed up like flight controllers and wearing a pair of coconut headsets, may derive some contentment from the whole process _ they may live in hope of a better future, they may enjoy having something to believe in, and they may feel closer to supernatural powers. But it__ just that _ it__ a story. It__ not a good predictor of what will happen next.The business world is full of Cargo Cult Science, books and articles that claim to be rigorous scientific research but operate mainly at the level of storytelling.