Matt Miller. The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: letting go of the old ways of thinking to unleash a new prosperity. Henry Holt. New York. 2009.

Dead ideas risk damaging everything dear to you and we must watch for when destined ideas start arising.

This book covers six dead ideas in 2009 and six possible destined ideas to overcome the harms from the dead ones. Miller italicizes individual key sentences interspersed throughout.

Presentation for Talks at Google: video, 1 hour.

Dead Ideas (2009, USA)

1. our children will earn more than we do
2. free trade is "good" no matter how many people it hurts
3. employers should play a central role in providing health coverage
4. taxes hurt the economy
5. "local control" of schools is essential
6. people tend to end up, in economic terms, where they deserve to

Interesting things

1. The Miniature Earth project
2. Better living items
   1. time with friends and loved ones
   2. building community
   3. quieter, savouring life pace
3. Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream
   1. community relationships over individual autonomy
   2. cultural diversity over assimilation
   3. quality of life over accumulating wealth
   4. sustainable development over unlimited material growth
   5. deep play over unrelenting toil
4. Practice candid self scrutiny to bury dead ideas
   1. monitor extinction rate for ideas
   2. "The indispensible new skill that organizations need to build is a way to institutionalize skeptical thinking, challenges to orthodoxy, and the questioning of fundamental premises."
   3. revisit our fundamental assumptions
      1. watch for the false consensus effect (confirmation bias, selective recall, biased evaluation and groupthink)
      2. watch for internal politics
      3. stop paying people to avoid confronting dead ideas
   4. foster diverse teams and establish norms and expectations for confronting and questioning assumptions
   5. foster "licensed heretics" to inject dissent within organization or as a "critical friend" (there are no dumb questions)
   6. set up mechanisms to regularly assess assumptions (dead idea watch list, process for understanding the story of the idea and finding new ways of thinking, ranking the ideas for deadness or continued life)
5. You can involve talented people without having them in your company: Business Talent Group