Entrepreneurs move their venture creation process from an uncertain, unknown future toward somewhat more certain and knowable. To support present actions about future outcomes on this journey, entrepreneurs essentially need to understand what they know and don’t know yet. Individuals, however, are not destined to have a complete awareness of their ignorance. It is precisely unawareness why a certain opportunity has not yet been exploited, but decisions require fast strategies to simplify information and not lose the opportunity. Thus, knowledge only might not naturally advance opportunities. This book provides insights about how entrepreneurs cope with this apparent contradiction. Based on qualitative and experimental insights, the book explores the relevance of knowing what you don’t know with the help of the science of self-awareness. A key point is that metacognition plays an essential role to overcome cognitive barriers to come to logical judgments and decisions.

'A brilliant new book' Daily Telegraph 'Well written . . . and often entertaining' The Times 'A sparkling analysis' Prospect When uncertainty is all around us, and the facts are not clear, how can we make good decisions? We do not know what the future will hold, particularly in the midst of a crisis, but we must make decisions anyway. We regularly crave certainties which cannot exist and invent knowledge we cannot have, forgetting that humans are successful because we have adapted to an environment that we understand only imperfectly. Throughout history we have developed a variety of ways of coping with the radical uncertainty that defines our lives. This incisive and eye-opening book draws on biography, history, mathematics, economics and philosophy to highlight the most successful - and most short-sighted - methods of dealing with an unknowable future. Ultimately, the authors argue, the prevalent method of our age falls short, giving us a false understanding of our power to make predictions, leading to many of the problems we experience today. Tightly argued, provocative and written with wit and flair, Radical Uncertainty is at once an exploration of the limits of numbers and a celebration of human instinct and wisdom.

Towards a Psychology of Entrepreneurship examines a theory of entrepreneurship, its empirical base and its implications. First, it argues that a psychological approach is necessary to understand entrepreneurship. Second, it argues that any theory of entrepreneurship should use active actions as a starting point - entrepreneurship is the epitome of an active agent in the market, rather than a reactive agent. Third, it discusses an action regulation theory to better understand the psychology of entrepreneurship. Fourth, it provides examples how this theory can help to understand entrepreneurial success. Finally, it suggests intervention programs to help entrepreneurs to be successful at growing their organizations. Towards a Psychology of Entrepreneurship presents a descriptive definition of the entrepreneur. It also emphasize that entrepreneurship does not necessarily imply the start-up and growth of business organizations but is a more general phenomenon of starting social organizations and changing organizations. Thus, it also includes social entrepreneurs in its definition of the entrepreneur - thus, founders of social service organizations are considered part of the entrepreneurship landscape.

Volume 14 addresses the central issue of entrepreneurial action: while many factors are important to the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship does not happen until someone takes action!

Capitalism faltered at the end of the 1990s as corporations were rocked by fraud, the stock-market bubble burst and the American business model – unfettered self-interest, privatization and low tax – faced a storm of protest. But what are the alternatives to the mantras of market fundamentalism? Leading economist John Kay unravels the truth about markets, from Wall Street to Switzerland, from Russia to Mumbai, examining why some nations are rich and some poor, why ‘one-size-fits-all’ globalization hurts developing countries and why markets can work – but only in a humane social and cultural context. His answers offer a radical new blueprint for the future.

Thoroughly revised and updated, International Entrepreneurship explains the opportunities and challenges facing internationalising entrepreneurial ventures. With a new section on international sustainable entrepreneurship and new cases and examples throughout, this second edition of a successful textbook will be indispensable for students of international entrepreneurship.

The follies of finance have threatened the stability of the global economy, and the world of finance has become increasingly complex and sophisticated, but also greedy, cynical and self-interested. The Long and the Short of It provides a guide to the complexities of modern finance and explains how to put your finances in the only hands you can confidently trust - your own. In this new, wholly updated edition of The Long and the Short of It, you will learn everything you need to be your own investment manager. You will recognise your investment options, the institutions that try to sell them, and how to distinguish between fact and fiction in what companies say. You will discover the principles of sound investment and the research that supports these principles. Crucially, you will learn a practical investment strategy and how to implement it. Leading economist and hugely successful investor John Kay uses his academic credentials and practical experience to lay out the key principles of investment with characteristic clarity and dry humour. This is the only book about finance and investment anyone needs, and the one book they must have.

Much economic advice is bogus quantification, warn two leading experts in this essential book, now with a preface on COVID-19. Invented numbers offer a false sense of security; we need instead robust narratives that give us the confidence to manage uncertainty. “An elegant and careful guide to thinking about personal and social economics, especially in a time of uncertainty. The timing is impeccable." — Christine Kenneally, New York Times Book Review Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry’s actuarial tables and the gambler’s roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000, no one—not least Steve Jobs—knew what a smartphone was; how could anyone have predicted how many would be sold in 2020? And financial advisers who confidently provide the information required in the standard retirement planning package—what will interest rates, the cost of living, and your state of health be in 2050?—demonstrate only that their advice is worthless. The limits of certainty demonstrate the power of human judgment over artificial intelligence. In most critical decisions there can be no forecasts or probability distributions on which we might sensibly rely. Instead of inventing numbers to fill the gaps in our knowledge, we should adopt business, political, and personal strategies that will be robust to alternative futures and resilient to unpredictable events. Within the security of such a robust and resilient reference narrative, uncertainty can be embraced, because it is the source of creativity, excitement, and profit.

This e-book brings together scholars in both the neurosciences and organizational sciences who have adopted various approaches to study the cognitive mechanisms mediating the social behavior that we see within organizations. Such an approach has been termed by ourselves, and others, as ‘organisational cognitive neuroscience’. In recent years there has been a veritable increase in studies that have explored the cognitive mechanisms driving such behaviors, and much progress has been made in understanding the neural underpinnings of processes such as financial exchange, risk awareness and even leadership. However, while these studies are informative and add to our understanding of human cognition they fall short of providing evidence-based recommendations for practice. Specifically, we address the broader issue of how the neuroscientific study of such core social behaviors can be used to improve the very way that we work. To address these gaps in our understanding the chapters in this book serve as a platform that allows scholars in both the neurosciences and the organizational sciences to highlight the work that spans across these two fields. The consolidation of these two fields also serves to highlight the utility of a singular organizational cognitive neuroscience. This is a fundamentally important outcome of the book as the application of neuroscience to address economically relevant behaviors has seen a variety of fields evolve in their own right, such as neuromarketing, neuroeconomics and so forth. The use of neuro-scientific technologies,in particular fMRI, has indeed led to a bewildering (and somewhat suffocating) proliferation of new approaches, however, the speed of such developments demands that we must proceed carefully with such ventures or risk some fundamental mistakes. The book that you now hold will consolidates these new neuroscience based approaches and in doing so highlight the importance of this approach in helping us to understand human social behavior in general. Taken together the chapters provide a framework for scholars within the neurosciences who wish to explore the further the opportunities that the study of organisational behavior may provide.

Money is a promise with future benefits or dangers that are unknowable and incalculable. The financial sector is an attempt to beat uncertainty by speculating on whether prices will rise or fall. No matter how often the folly of this opportunism is shown through crisis after crisis of trust, efforts to defeat uncertainty persist. Yet uncertainty is unavoidable. Squeezed in one place, it emerges in another. Based on extensive interviews with leading actors in the financial sector, this book argues that the only way to cope with uncertainty is by relying on emotions and values. It presents an original explanation of how booms and busts arise from internal disputes over the emotions of trust between global financial corporations. Confidence and suspicion alternate between which strategy may beat competitors and who is cheating whom. Just as the first edition warned of continuing dangers in finance's betrayal of society's trust, this new edition provides a sociological explanation of how these irrational quests for certainty contributed to the current financial crisis in the credibility of money.