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Ideas: Practical Perspectives

Collected applied topics and case studies in ideas.

24 chapters · About 251 minutes · Free to read

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Contents

  1. 01"This time is different": the stories that inflate bubblesEvery bubble comes with a persuasive story about a new era. Why those stories are usually partly true, how they get stretched too far, and how to test a new-era claim.
  2. 02A short history of bubbles: from tulips to technologyTulips, the South Sea Company, railways, 1929, Japan, the dot-com boom and US housing: a guided tour of famous bubbles and the lessons they share.
  3. 03Building up and boring down: what lifts, frames, foundations and tunnels teach about enabling technologiesTall buildings needed lifts, frames and cheap steel together, and tunnels needed machines that protect the surface. What their history teaches about enablers, trust and decoupling.
  4. 04Clean water as an engineered system: barriers, gravity and supply security, and lessons for operationsUrban water supply saved more lives than almost any other engineering. How treatment, sewerage, storage and desalination developed, and what they teach about barriers and monitoring.
  5. 05Clocks, telephones and radar: what the engineering of shared signals teaches about networks and detectionPublic clocks, telephone exchanges, broadcasting and radar each solved a problem of shared signals. Their history holds lessons on standards, network growth and false alarms.
  6. 06Engineering the system: what containerisation and the critical path method teach about interfaces and dependenciesA steel box and a scheduling algorithm changed the economy without new physics. How containerisation and the critical path method developed, and their lessons on interfaces and bottlenecks.
  7. 07Engines after steam: internal combustion, diesel, gas turbines and matching technology to the dutyPetrol, diesel and gas turbine engines each won where their strengths matched the work. How they developed, why efficiency depends on compression and temperature, and how to choose power.
  8. 08Flight, fatigue and rockets: what aerospace history teaches about development, control and repeated loadsThe Wright brothers, the sound barrier, the Comet airliner and the rocket equation show how to find the governing problem, test cheaply and design for repeated loads.
  9. 09Framing, certainty and the limits of rational choiceDecision theory describes how choices should be made; people often choose differently. How the certainty effect, framing and prospect theory shape real decisions, and how to design around them.
  10. 10From automata to algorithms: a short history of automated decision makingHow economics, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, engineering, mathematics and operations research each contributed to the methods machines use to make decisions.
  11. 11From bargains to quality: how Buffett moved beyond GrahamBenjamin Graham taught Warren Buffett to buy businesses for less than they were worth. Buffett's shift towards owning great businesses for decades offers a lesson that reaches well beyond investing.
  12. 12From punched cards to the cloud: a short history of the database and what it teaches businessesDatabases evolved from punched cards and tape to relational systems, NoSQL and cloud services. How each step solved a problem, and lessons about data that outlives its systems.
  13. 13From telegraph to grid: how electrification was engineered, and what it teaches about systems and standardsElectricity became useful through systems, not single inventions. How the telegraph, electric light, the AC and DC contest and the grid developed, and lessons on standards and networks.
  14. 14From training to habit: building a personal action planGood intentions fade; habits last. How to turn new skills into a short, specific personal action plan, and why small, repeated actions beat ambitious resolutions.
  15. 15From transistor to smartphone: how the digital economy was engineered, and lessons for product businessesTransistors, integrated circuits, microprocessors and networks turned computing into a cheap component. How it happened and what it teaches about cost curves, generality and standards.
  16. 16How materials changed industry: iron, steel, aluminium, plastics and engineered timberCheap, reliable materials made modern engineering possible. How iron, bulk steel, aluminium, plastics, concrete and engineered timber developed, and what they teach about substitution.
  17. 17How people decide: emotion, reason and what neuroscience really saysSales training often says buyers decide with a primitive brain. The real science is more interesting. What we know about emotion and reason in decisions, and how to sell honestly.
  18. 18Interchangeable parts and the rise of mass production: from armoury gauges to the moving assembly lineMass production came from replacing skilled fitting with tolerances, gauges and flow. How interchangeable manufacture and the assembly line developed, and what they teach manufacturers.
  19. 19Shared goals, separate views: how teams coordinate without full informationWhen team members share a goal but each sees only part of the picture, coordination is surprisingly hard. Lessons from collaborative agents research for designing teams, roles and communication.
  20. 20Steam power and the business of improvement: lessons from Newcomen, Watt and TrevithickThe steam engine was improved for a century before it changed the world. What Newcomen, Smeaton, Watt and Trevithick teach about efficiency, improvement, selling savings and safety.
  21. 21The forgetting curve: why training fades and how to make it stickMost of what we learn in a workshop is gone within weeks. What the forgetting curve tells us about memory, and practical ways to turn training into lasting skill.
  22. 22The psychology of bubbles: why sensible people join inBubbles are not driven only by greed or foolishness. Extrapolation, herding, social proof, overconfidence and fading memories lead sensible people to join in. How to recognise and resist them.
  23. 23Thinking in probabilities: degrees of belief for better decisionsProbability is a language for uncertainty. How degrees of belief, distributions, conditional probability and Bayes' rule help you reason clearly about evidence and risk.
  24. 24Why bubble warnings come too early, and why timing is so hardPeople who warn of bubbles are often right about the risk and wrong about the timing. Why warnings arrive early, why markets can stay overvalued for years, and how to act without predicting the top.

All chapters preserve the original KEVOS Insights content. These topic-based reading collections are organised alphabetically; chapters may be read in any order.

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