Immunize Yourself Against Business How-To B.S.

Before you read your next business how-to book, you should really check out "The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers." to immunize yourself from plausible, but false, claims in those books. You should be better armed to spot bad reasoning contained in books that might otherwise waste your time.

I'm ashamed to admit that in my youth, I read a lot of business how-to books. Over a few years, I realized that the claims in the books were quite sloppily supported by evidence. I then stopped reading most of them. A few years back, I heard of a book called "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets" and the title got me interested enough to read it and found it to be very instructive. When the author of Fooled by Randomness mentioned The Halo Effect, I checked it out also.