Michael Mainelli

I really really really (really) wanted to like this book. The premise is excellent: understand better how the world of commerce really works by combining insights from the study of how people make choices, economics, systems thing, and evolution. However, in practice, the book was a hodgepodge of interesting ideas which were never quite brought together.

It isn't that I was looking for some grand unified theory. As the authors note, we need to broaden our understanding before we try to simplify to a theory. However, I did expect some amount of connection to be made between different streams. Very little was, however. After the authors talked about choice, it rarely came up again. Even within the sections, lots of concepts were presented without being connected.

So that's the bad. The good is that the book did cover a lot of interesting topics, and I learned some new things, and the underlying ideas behind the book were sound. The authors clearly know their stuff, and I just wish things had felt a bit less scattered.… (more)