Noteworthy recent HBR articles

"Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking." -- Albert Einstein

This is not new news, but there was a new article by Thomas Davenport (the author of "Competing on Analytics") in February 2009 issue of HBR called "How to Design Smart Business Experiments". I actually read it, and I liked it better than his iconic article that was eventually tuned into the book. The most recent article shows a very practical approach, and it is executive-proof. I made copies and distributed at work with an obvious goal to educate my co-workers about smart testing.

July-August 2009 issue of HBR features an interesting article by Dan Ariely "The End of Rational Economics", where he gives interesting examples of irrational economic behavior, and which I read. Not surprisingly, Ariely also has a book on the topic "Predictably Irrational", and a web site with a good amount of information and interviews. Obviously, I am going to recommend checking out the web-site first.

P.S. I am not a great reader (of books), so unless it is explicitly stated that I read something, you can assume that I skimmed the ideas in reviews and thought they were worthy of notice.