"This is a brilliant compendium of the main errors we make in misidentifying the role of chance in many relevant personal and professional fields. It offers guidance on how to navigate in the real world by dealing with our illusion of control and our impulse to get clear answers. It is written by true experts. It is informative yet so much fun to read.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
"Fortune favors the prepared. Reading this remarkably insightful book will prepare you to be lucky! It is a gift for all of us trying to control our destiny, but wishing for a better outcome.”
Nitin Nohria, Richard P. Chapman Professor, Harvard Business School – Co-Author of Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices
"Learning to live with uncertainty is the biggest challenge in our modern technological society. If everyone were to read this spirited, easy-to-digest, and highly competent book that dispels superstition and illusory certainty, the world would become a more enlightened place.”
Gerd Gigerenzer, Director, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin – Author of Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious and Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You
"Dance with Chance provides fascinating evidence in the most important domains of our lives that we fail to recognize the role of chance, and as a result make strategic errors that reduce our wealth, health, career success and happiness. The authors make a compelling case that those who learn to dance will maximize how they deal with chance."
Max H. Bazerman, Straus Professor, Harvard Business School – Author of Judgment and Managerial Decision Making and Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen and How to Prevent Them
"Absolutely fascinating! A must read!”
Robert J. Herbold, Executive Vice President and former Chief Operating Officer, Microsoft Corporation
“Dance with Chance is a provocative book masquerading as a delightful read. The stories add just the right touch to the serious subjects that the authors address. As a preventive medicine-trained physician, I was particularly taken with the chapters on health care. In them the authors demonstrate how the understanding of statistics and chance can lead to different conclusions than contemporary medical practice would suggest.”
David Lawrence MD, Ex-CEO Kaiser Permanente
"I keep on buying business books with the hope of finally finding one that makes a difference. Usually, in reading yet another book, I end up quite disappointed. Much of what appears in management literature is nothing more than a recycling of old ideas. Recently, however, I read Dance with Chance, a book that does make a difference. In an extremely erudite but also very readable way, the authors shatter many of our myths about the way we make decisions, including the way we make up our minds about life-changing matters such as health, wealth, longevity, and careers. For those people interested in facing the uncertainties of life with a greater sense of reality, this book will be a must!”
Manfred Kets de Vries, Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Raoul de Vitry d’Avaucourt Chaired Professor of Leadership Development, INSEAD – Author of Kets de Vries on Leadership, Desire, Money, Happiness and Death: Musings from the Underground and Coach and Couch: The Psychology of Making Better Leaders
"Prepare to be dismayed. The limits to our ability to predict the future and control it are far greater than we imagined. But paralysis, we learn here, is not the proper response. While luck plays a huge role in our lives, our goal should be to increase the likelihood of making wiser decisions about the future. Here is a brilliant guide to doing just that!”
Marvin Zonis, Professor Emeritus of Business Administration, The University of Chicago – Author of The Kimchi Matters: Global Business and Local Politics in a Crisis Driven World, The Eastern European Opportunity, and The Political Elite of Iran
"Dance with Chance is an irreverent pas de deux covering such fascinating domains as medicine, investments, society and even science. It highlights how chance influences each of these areas, producing illusions, bad forecasts, self-proclaimed gurus and false prophets along the way. Enjoy this excellent expert treatment of a challenging and timely subject, presented with wonderful anecdotes, subtle insights and a deep appreciation of human folly.”
Paul J. H. Schoemaker, PhD., Executive Chairman, Decision Strategies International – Author of Winning Decisions, Profiting from Uncertainty and Peripheral Vision
"A motivational jackpot! Turns conventional wisdom on its head by offering the reader a profoundly important and counter-intuitive idea: the best way to be in control is to release control. Full of striking statistics, yet remains fast-moving and eminently readable.”
Bill Treasurer – Author of Right Risk: 10 Powerful Principles for Taking Giant Leaps
"A brilliant and engaging book. Particularly relevant in the current global economic and financial crisis, it reads like a thriller and I could not put it down.”
Vijai Gill, CEO, Salamander Capital, UK
“A very useful and timely book.”
Peter Taylor-Gooby FRSA, Professor of Social Policy, University of Kent, Director of ESRC research programme, Social Contexts and Responses to Risk
"Across continents, across nations, chance plays a pivotal role in business success. Dance with Chance challenges your gut feelings. Their [the authors’] case studies are captivating. They illustrate with brio the wide applications of statistics. A must read for powerful decision making in an uncertain world.”
Daniel Labrecque, President & Chief Executive Officer, N M Rothschild & Sons, Canada
"Dance with Chance is outstanding. It is very well written and readable in the sense that one wants to go on, it proves that academic research in business schools can lead to pragmatic and relevant applications, and it provides learning for business and individuals for professional and private life.”
Michael Roskothen, Managing Partner, Atlantic Century Partners, and former Executive Officer and President Global Oral Care, Colgate Palmolive
"Dance with Chance is not just a book for statisticians. It explores the perennial themes of chance and impermanence in a way that people of diverse backgrounds will find entertaining, relevant and informative to their lives. I certainly found it so!”
Toby Ouvry, Creative Director (and a trained Buddhist monk), Platinum Light Pte Ltd
"Dance with Chance premiers a delightful ballet of novel insights elegantly presented. Bravo! Encore!”
Robert B. Cialdini – Author of Influence: Science and Practice
"An informed, well-written, and entertaining guide to the science and psychology of chance. The central message – that cultivating the right attitude towards risk and luck can help boost your health, finances and happiness – turns out to be liberating and life-affirming.”
David Orrell – Author of The Future of Everything: The Science of Prediction
"[Dance with Chance] provides fresh ways of dealing with the basic problem of what is knowable and what is not, and our understanding of the difference between the two. It has the strength of presenting complex and subtle discussions and making them very accessible to the reader.”
Bernard Drury, President and CEO, Drury Capital Inc.
"This book tells the truth, however unpopular, unpleasant or unrewarding, about what we really know about running a company or making investment decisions. You might ‘feel’ more empowered after reading the latest business bestseller, and you might ‘think’ you are more enabled after reading the newest advice on how-to-make-a-million-in-the-stock-market, but you are really being deceived. These three accomplished authors show how the world really works and back it up with an impressive body of indisputable evidence.”
Steven Schnaars – Author of Megamistakes and Managing Imitation Strategies
"A fascinating and thought-provoking read. Dance with Chance explains the fundamental truth that control is merely an illusion and chance has much more to bear on our lives than we would all like to think. My thanks to the authors!”
Vinit Chandra, Head of Global Commercial Products, Barclays Commercial Bank, Barclays Bank PLC
“A very insightful book about the need to respect and not underestimate the power of chance. Thinking we can predict more than what we can predict can be the recipe for catastrophe. It is important to learn to live happily with uncertainty – in general as well as in matters related to our health.”
John Ioannidis, Professor and Chairman, Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina, Greece – Member of the Editorial Board, PLoS Medicine