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United Nations NGO Committee on Sustainable Development
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Dirty Rotten Strategies: How We Trick Ourselves and Others into Solving the Wrong Problems Precisely (High Reliability and Crisis Management) |  | Authors: Ian I. Mitroff, Abraham Silvers
Publisher: Stanford Business Books
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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as of 7/30/2010 12:20 CDT details
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Seller: rivermom
Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 291204
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 232
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1
ISBN: 0804759960
Dewey Decimal Number: 650.1
EAN: 9780804759960
ASIN: 0804759960
Publication Date: October 21, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
People and organizations are perfectly capable of making the most outrageous missteps. But, how does a person, organization, or society know that it is committing an error? And, how can we tell that when others are steering us down wrong paths?
Dirty Rotten Strategies delves into how organizations and interest groups lure us into solving the "wrong problems" with intricate, but inaccurate, solutions. Authors Ian I. Mitroff and Abraham Silvers argue that we can never be sure if we have set our sights on the wrong problem, but there are definite signals that can alert us to this possibility.
While explaining how to detect and avoid dirty rotten strategies, the authors put the media, healthcare, national security, academia, and organized religion under the microscope. They offer a biting critique that examines the failure of these major institutions to accurately define our most pressing problems. For example, the U.S. healthcare industry strives to be the most technologically advanced in the world, but, our cutting-edge system does not ensure top-quality care to the largest number of people.
Readers will find that far too many institutions have enormous incentives to let us devise elaborate solutions to the wrong problems. As Thomas Pynchon said," If they can get you asking the wrong questions, then they don't have to worry about the answers."
From a political perspective, this book shows why liberals and conservatives define problems differently, and demonstrates how each political view is incomplete without the other. Our concerns are no longer solely liberal or conservative. In fact, we can no longer trust a single group to define issues across the institutions explored in this book and beyond.
Dirty Rotten Strategies is a bipartisan call for anyone who is ready to think outside the box to address our major concerns as a society—starting today.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 6
 Project managers need to read this book. March 30, 2010
Lon Roberts - Author "SPC for Right-Brain Thinkers" (Plano, TX)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Regardless of your political leanings, this is a must-read book for anyone who cares about clear-headed thinking and the ploys that are used to trick us into solving the wrong problems. When "solving the wrong problem" is done unintentionally, the authors refer to this as a Type III error; when it is intentional, they refer to this as a Type IV error.
In essence the book is about qualitative analysis involving high-stakes situations, though the authors don't refer to it as such. It speaks to the logic that is involved (or should be involved) in properly framing and characterizing complex societal problems ... long before the statistician starts crunching numbers. I highly recommend the book to policy makers, decision makers, aspiring statisticians, or anyone, for that matter, who wants to recognize when and how they are being manipulated by politicians, the media, advertisers, think tanks, SIGs, etc. Also, as one who instructs and consults project managers, I believe PMs would benefit from recognizing that many of the requirements-related problems they encounter are essentially Type III errors.
But make no mistake, the authors go after some sacred cows: politics (especially right-of-center politics), the health insurance industry, religion, science, and education. So, you may need to check your sensitivities at the door if you wish to read the book with an open mind.
Surprisingly amateurish May 7, 2010
Casual Observer (CHAPEL HILL, NC, US)
In view of the authors' credentials and experience, this book is quite poorly written. It is full of weakly documented assertions - most of which I agree with, but not owing to their logic or evidence. The writing is exceedingly repetitive. And it's laced with numerous irritatingly sophomoric phrases like: "Their views of the world - that is, their worldviews - ..." It would seem that the Stanford Business Books series does not employ professional editors.
The idea that we often tackle the wrong problem and the few insights into why this is the case are valuable offerings. The overly grandiose dubbing of this notion as a Type 3 (and Type 4) error gets to be a bit much, especially after reading "Type 3 error" a few hundred times. In general, this is a book that richly deserves to be a 10-page article.
I saw a CSPAN broadcast of Mitroff's talk to the Commonwealth Club of California, which was pretty interesting. As a result I thought this would be an interesting read. I was quite wrong. It's more of a polemic. Though I generally agree with the authors political leanings, this book was far too simplistic to hold my interest.
So far Left Wing... he loses his audience and point May 7, 2010
Steven Vaughan (Napa, CA)
This book starts off strong by pointing out how organizations and people make key errors in logic - he does a good job of defining what these are and how they affect each of us in daily decision making. Well done... but, it digresses rapidly as the author begins using lame extreme left-wing examples to badger right-wing'ers on how conservatives are fundamentally poor decision makers. The title of the book should be "conservatives are stupid and I'm going to show you why". He lost it his authoring and educational authority once he went into this "mode" and it's unfortunate because he could have produced a solid book on logic that could have been very helpful. Back to titles, the tag line "Dirty Rotten Strategies" really alludes to nothing on what the book is about other than blaming conservatives for all the ill will in the world and all their mean "rotten strategies" - thus the title. I had to think about it for a while.. why this title and it's clear after reading the book and the author's purpose.
Unfortunately this author is so blind to his own extreme left-wing conspiracy theories that he stumbles over his own logic and makes you wonder if he even knows how flawed he looks in his own writings. He would have had a decent book if he kept his examples to "neutral" business cases which would have been brilliant in clarify his main points - at least it would not have antagonized or alienated some of his readers. I really think this book was laid out to bash right-winger's otherwise read his concepts and filter out the "bad conservatives" message and you might get the points that make sense and can be helpful with anyone who has an honest desire to learn about errors in logic and how to become better people for it.
Little substance; drones on about Bush era March 28, 2010
JKM (Wash DC)
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
Read this book if you're looking for new ways to catagorize the mistakes of the Bush Admin.
 Disappointing April 10, 2010
C. E. Stevens
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Mitroff and Silvers have a fascinating concept about our propensity (sometimes confused, sometimes purposeful) to ask the wrong questions about complex problems, thereby getting the wrong solutions. The book, however, is poorly written, repetative, repetative, repetative, annoying at times (especially when they come across as angry) and often uses circular arguments, all of which undermine their own insights and make them less convincing. The attempt to scientificize their idea into type III and IV errors (an extension of the classic type I and II errors in statistics) is cute but unnecessary and confusing. Reads like a series of lectures that could have been made into a brief article, not a full book. The authors needed a good editor.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 6
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