Andreessen: Most business books confuse correlation with causation
Marc Andreessen · a16z Podcast | Competing Against Luck · Jan 2, 2019 · at 4:57
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, explains why he believes the majority of business books fail to provide actionable strategic guidance.
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“A big reason for that, I found, is a lot of business books kind of fall into two traps. One is they extrapolate off the recent past, and so they're very kind of short-term in nature. It's whatever worked in the last five years projects forward. The other problem they have is I think they confuse correlation with causation. And so they'll, they'll take a set of companies that are doing well and then attempt to reverse engineer the causes for why those companies are doing well. When in reality, generally what you're seeing are the effects of what happens when companies do well.”
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