2023 Starling Bookshelf

“In order to search for a new morality based upon a more truthful definition of man, it is necessary to look inward, to dissect the machinery of the mind and to retrace its evolutionary history.”

“Each person is molded by an interaction of his environment, especially his cultural environment, with the genes that affect social behavior.”

“Like most other mammals, human beings display a behavioral scale, a spectrum of responses that appear or disappear according to particular circumstances.”

“Individual agency does not mean total freedom from biology; it is always exercised in the context of an organism’s evolved capacities.”

“The foundation stone of uniquely human agency is individuals’ ability and propensity to form with others a joint goal, thereby creating an evolutionarily unique, socially constituted feedback control system.”

“[E]arly human individuals not only collaborated to achieve joint goals but also collaborated to self-regulate the collaboration.”

“[It] is precisely the conventionally unmeasureable that is actually the most important factor that determines how well an organization performs. This viewpoint reflects one simple fact: an organization is not a machine — it is a collection of individual human beings, and it simultaneously benefits and suffers from both the cleverness and the limitations to which the human social world is prone.”

“When an organizational culture works best, the organization belongs to the people as much as they belong to ‘it.’”

Our thanks go to Robin Dunbar for contributing to the 2022 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“When contracts are incomplete, the de facto terms of the exchange are determined in large part by the strategic interaction between the parties, not by the courts.”

“[T]he trust that is essential to mutually beneficial exchange when contracts are incomplete appears to be learned in precisely the kinds of trading relationships that evolve when contracts are incomplete.”

“[P]olicies premised on the belief that citizens or employees are entirely self-interested often induce people to act exactly that way.”

“Morality achieves something almost miraculous, and fundamental to human achievement and liberty. It creates trust.”

“The stronger the bonds of community, the more powerful the force of trust, and the more we can achieve together.”

“Markets do not survive by market forces alone. They depend on respect for the people affected by our decisions. Lose that and we will lose not just money and jobs but something more significant still: freedom, trust, and decency, the things that have value, not a price.”

“As a society, we’re facing challenges of a scale and complexity that capitalism as we know it is struggling to address.”

“Purpose is why an enterprise exists — who it serves, its reason for being and the role it plays in the world.”

“If companies don’t realize the value that they can create for, and take from, society, they’ll lose their social license to operate... This in turn may lead to anti-business regulation being passed that will damage their long-run productivity.”

Our thanks go to Alex Edmans for contributing to the 2023 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“What is driving the economy now isn’t tangible assets but intangible ones: the talents and skills within the organization, and the social capital developed outside of it.”

“Purpose-driven companies have better outcomes — in part beause there are incredible ways to use sustainability factors as business drivers, motivating more innovation and informing decisions about products and services, and also in part because companies that care about these issues inspire employees who care and who are willing to invest more and work harder.”

“The effect of the Enron shock is to remind us of something that strategists, managers, and designers of organizations frequently ignore — that the economy rests on an institutional bedrock.”

“It is easy to forget that the state, along with the various organizations and social norms that promote trust and confidence in economic transactions, have a critical influence on which organizations and strategies will succeed.”

“This idea is the basis of a growing, pan-disciplinary literature that seeks to explain the conduct and performance of individuals, organizations, and states.”

“A good set of institutions is hard to achieve. Bad institutions, by contrast, are easy to get stuck in. And this is why most countries have been poor for most of history, as well as illiterate, unhealthy, and bloody.”

“The peculiar essence of our financial system is an unprecedented trust between man and man; and when that trust is much weakened by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident may almost destroy it.”

“So-called ‘reputational capital’ may not be readily apparent on a firm’s balance sheet, but there is plenty of evidence that it is nonetheless significant.”

“Falling confidence in banking (a credibility crisis) does not, a priori, fuel a political problem for the state (a legitimacy crisis). In contrast, falling confidence in the banks that had been bailed out [in ‘08-09] and thereby protected by the state, whilst average Americans were then confronted by social spending cuts, turned a credibility crisis for the banks into a legitimacy crisis for the state. “

“Deep down, the central problem of cooperation among any set of wholly autonomous actors is what to do about dissembling, lying, and broken promises.”

“When a state pools or delegates power and authority in an international regime or organization, it is vitally important that its legitimacy at home is not undermined. An international system’s legitimacy has two dimensions: among states and between individual states and their peoples.”

Our thanks go to Sir Paul Tucker for contributing to the 2023 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“We can’t just work to help people recover trust in institutions. The slide in confidence is a generational one, and we can’t wait a generation or two to begin to engage with institutions. We know that mistrust leads to disengagement, and we cannot afford decades in which people choose to disengage with democracy. Instead, we must transform the institutions we have, even as we build new movements and new approaches to tackle the challenges our societies face... [We] need a new toolkit for some very old problems.”

“The financial system is, for all practical purposes, infinitely complex, so no matter how intensively we study the system and how hard we try to control it, we still can focus only on a tiny part of it — systemic risk emerges precisely where we are not looking.”

“The economy is different from the physical world. It is based on the behavior of human beings, many of whom are intent on doing exactly what they want to do — rules or no rules. In physics, math captures all; not so in the society of humans that form the economy.”

“Many people first encounter formal models of social phenomena in introductory economics courses. Those models often rely on a rudimentary rational-actor model in which everyone is self-interested and capable of optimizing… Based on this experience, many people infer that formal modeling requires a narrow, unrealistic view of human nature... We must disabuse ourselves of that view.”

Our thanks go to Scott Page for contributing to the 2023 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Where there is no adequate basis for formulating probabilities ... we face radical uncertainty.”

“Most economists today pay — at best — lip service to the difference between risk and uncertainty. The problem of radical uncertainty has supposedly been tamed by probabilistic reasoning … And, so, instead of recognizing radical uncertainty, and adopting policies and strategies that will be robust to many alternative futures, banks and businesses are run with reliance on models which claim knowledge of the future that we do not have and never could have.”

Our thanks go to John Kay for contributing to the 2022 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Every potential accident gives signals before it becomes an accident. To enhance our chance of preventing catastrophe, we must learn to discern these signals.”

“Before and after accidents, managers in many organizations focus their attention on trying to improve the technical side of the system to control risk and improve productivity ... When too little attention is devoted to [the] human side, the resulting ineffective relationships, poor communication, and bad decision-making have the ability to create tragic outcomes ...”

“The global financial crisis was a rude awakening for the world of risk management. The risks that caused the crisis did not fit neatly into existing risk categories.”

“Groups are a ubiquitous feature of all large institutions. Be it the board, the executive or teams across the organizations, it is rare that decisions are made by individuals unilaterally. For this reason, an understanding of ethical failure requires us to try to explain why a group of people, working together, can collectively condone, endorse or turn a blind eye to unethical behavior.”

“Culture represents an interdependent set of values and ways of behaving that are common in a community and that tend to perpetuate themselves, sometimes over long periods of time. This continuity is the product of a variety of social forces that are frequently subtle, bordering on invisible, through which people learn a group’s norms and values, and are rewarded when they accept them, and are ostracized when they do not.”

“[O]rganizations are social communities, not economic machines.”

“Although the dynamics of crisis and change manifest at many different levels simultaneously, most people focus on what can be seen and try to ignore the unseen.”

“[But] leaders and followers in organizations can uncover and frame the dynamics that influence crisis and change at individual, group, and organizational levels, in ways that are pragmatic and applicable.”

“[B]elonging to a community or a cause bigger than ourselves is core to our very humanity in three specific ways: belonging shapes our identity, it provides our sense of security, and it creates the order we need to survive.”

“What are the preexisting communities that exist within your organization? How can you harness their power by giving them a purpose aligned with organizational goals? And who are the influencers within these communities whose impact you can tap?”

“People, the tasks they perform and the jobs they do, are embedded within networks of human connections. It is through these connections that flow knowledge, insight and innovation. One of the major insights from the experience of the pandemic is how important these often-overlooked human connections are to organizational health and vitality.”

“Before decisions about the redesign of work are taken, you need to have a view of the current structure of networks and knowledge flows...”

“Evidence-informed policies can be contrasted to ideas that flow from intuitions and everyday knowledge. In the arena of law, people often feel that their experiences equip them with wisdom about what other people are like, what is effective in shaping behavior, and other issues relevant to law ... These feelings of self-confidence conflict with many findings of psychological research, which cast doubt on even experts’ ability to be rational even when they are experts in some area.”

Our thanks go to Tom Tyler for contributing to the 2022 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“While management tends to rely on the official chain of command, it is increasingly evident that the informal network, capturing who really communicates with whom, plays the most important role in the success of an organization. Accurate maps of such organizational networks can expose the potential lack of ineractions between key units, help identify individuals who play an important role in bringing different departments and products together, and help higher management diagnose diverse organizational issues.”

Our thanks go to Albert-László Barabási for contributing to the 2023 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Though we hate to admit it, we act in consistent and predictable ways, to the point that there are clear identifiable patterns underlying our unique habits and everyday behaviors.”

“If data fuels the digital revolution, the value of data is based on its promise to decode human behavior, with a new level of granularity, scale, standardization, and automation.”

“The key goal is not for AI to replace human expertise, but to enhance it ... with the help of data-driven insights produced by AI.”

Our thanks go to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic for contributing to the 2023 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Technology plays a key role in orchestrating workforce ecosystems. Technologies enhance and enable capabilities for managing workforces that operate across and beyond organizational boundaries. They can also facilitate new relationships along with novel ways of collecting and analyzing data relevant to workforce ecosystems.”

“The analysis of workforce ecosystems will likely become a management subdiscipline — perhaps one that combines people analytics, behavioral economics, organizational network analysis, and data visualization.”

Our thanks go to David Kiron for contributing to the 2022 Compendium. Read his piece here.