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"I am – I was – a geek. I played chess. I was the British girls under-14 champion."
So said Rachel Reeves in a Guardian interview. The Independent, Sky News, and Reuters ran similar headlines:
They claimed that her chess ability would lead to her becoming a successful chancellor. Reeves herself said "I've learned to think ahead, to ...
Chris van Tulleken’s “Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … And Why Can’t We Stop?”, on the dangers of Ultra-Processed Food (UPF), was one of the most successful books of 2023. It was a #1 Sunday Times Bestseller and an Economist, Daily Mail, Good Housekeeping, and Amazon Book of the Year. Even now (January 2025) ...
In March 2022, my LinkedIn feed lit up with people sharing this article:
It is by Reuters, a highly-respected news source, on a report by Arabesque, an asset manager and data provider I greatly admire and wrote about in Grow the Pie. It was taken at face value and shared uncritically by LinkedIn Top Voices, such as the post below with ...
The opioid epidemic has seen the over-prescription of opioids as painkillers. An estimated 645,000 people died from opioid use between 1999 to 2021 in the U.S. alone, with the figure running into millions worldwide.
Why was something prescribed which is so clearly addictive? Because it wasn't clearly addictive. Indeed, an article published ...
In May Contain Lies, I highlight the value of academic research. While it's far from perfect, it can be more reliable than practitioner studies for a number of reasons:
Its goal is scientific inquiry, rather than advocacy of a pre-existing position or releasing findings to improve a company's image.
It's conducted by those with ...
A widely quoted statistic is that only 2% of VC funding goes to female founders. For example, this Forbes article highlights that "only 2% of all VC funding goes to women-led startups" and asks "Why is only 2% of VC funding going to female founders"? If true, this statistic is substantial underrepresentation and needs to be urgently ...
Two leading asset management firms drew my attention to the McKinsey Organizational Health Index as a potential tool to evaluate a company. A book, "Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change", written by two McKinsey partners, claimed that companies with high scores on this Index trounced their unhealthy peers ...
I was struck by the Harvard Business Review headline "Companies that Practice 'Conscious Capitalism' Perform 10x Better". On the one hand, it appealed to my confirmation bias. Conscious capitalism involves serving stakeholders, not just shareholders, in line with my book Grow the Pie and work on purposeful busienss more generally. On the ...
In 2015, 2018, and 2020, McKinsey released a trio of papers claiming that diversity has a positive causal impact on firm performance, titled "Diversity Matters", "Delivering Through Diversity", and "Diversity Wins". These studies make basic errors, as highlighted by Green and Hand (2021) and others, yet were widely cited - perhaps due to ...
One of the papers that I cited most prominently in Grow the Pie is "Corporate Sustainability: First Evidence on Materiality". It shows that ESG doesn't always pays off: firms with high ESG scores don't beat the market; only those that focus their ESG efforts on issues material to their industry. For example, climate change is a serious global ...
'Want a more innovative company? Hire more women'. The title hooked me immediately. I’m an avid follower of the @TEDTalks Twitter page, but I don’t have time to watch every talk. But when I saw one with the title ‘Want a more innovative company? Hire more women’, I wanted to hit play instantly.
Confirmation bias leads us to make up excuses to dismiss facts we don’t like. If our favourite politician gets elected and the economy tanks, we’d argue it would have done worse had she not been in charge. Or we’d protest that we need to wait another year before we can truly evaluate her performance.
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