Nonfiction

The Wrong Lessons

The more vivid the experience, the more confidently we draw the wrong lesson from it.

From the officers who watched the machine gun win in Manchuria and still went home preaching the bayonet, to the gambler who mistakes a streak for skill and the country trapped in a failing war, one engine keeps turning hard-won experience into false certainty. Drawing on war, leadership, and behavioral science, The Wrong Lessons follows that error across the disasters it has caused, then asks why, in each one, a few people saw clearly anyway. Their edge was not talent or better information. It was distance, and distance can be borrowed.