Leading Publisher Acquires New Book from Visionary Thinker who Predicted Financial Crisis
Collins has acquired The Tiger and The Snake: Twelve Steps to Making Smarter Decisions from Noreena Hertz, one of the most influential and visionary thinkers on the international stage. UK and Commonwealth rights were acquired by Hannah MacDonald, Collins Publisher, and Helena Nicholls, Senior Commissioning Editor from Ed Victor at Ed Victor Ltd.
For more than two decades Noreena Hertz’s economic and societal predictions have been accurate and ahead of the curve. In her bestselling book The Silent Takeover, Hertz predicted that under-regulated markets and massive financial institutions would destabilise and devastate the West with serious political and economic ramifications. Whilst her 2005 bestseller, IOU: The Debt Threat, predicted the 2008 financial crisis.
In The Tiger and the Snake Noreena turns her mind to the individual – and how each of us make our decisions whether at work or in our personal lives. In a fractured world of virtual communication and information overload we have become “info-misers”, “narrow-casters”, “copy cats” and “slavish followers of so-called experts”.
Hertz reveals the extent to which life-altering, business-affecting, policy-determining, and also health-defining decisions are being made based on partial information, conventional (but often ill judged) wisdoms, corrupted data and insufficient scrutiny. From Alan Greenspan’s claims that subprime derivatives were safe to Akia Toyoda’s reluctance to recall those malfunctioning Toyotas to stories of radiologists misdiagnosing tumours – Hertz takes us on a journey that reveals the extent to which we cede our intellectual power at our peril.
Hertz’s call for a revolution in the way we think brings insight into what we can do to reverse these dominant trends. In twelve clear stages Hertz constructs a path to more astute decision making. By embracing chaos, browsing not searching, co-creating knowledge, engineering discord, taking on experts, and distrusting our senses we can make better choices and more accurate predictions in order to become smarter decision makers and better problem solvers – whether we’re a President, an investor a mother or a daughter.
Hannah MacDonald says: “Helena and I are thrilled to be working with Noreena on The Tiger and The Snake. Noreena Hertz’s joining Collins represents a major coup for us in our campaign to publish the finest thinkers and deliver game-changing ideas. The world has changed seismically over the last decade of technological development and we need to adapt the way we make decisions in this modern world. Noreena will deliver a groundbreaking book to change the way we think.”
Noreena Hertz says: “This book is the culmination of five years of research. In an age in which it is more essential than ever before to be accurately informed and in which it is increasingly hard to determine who to trust, and what to believe, I hope to empower my readers so as to enable then to make smarter and better decisions whether at home or in the workplace.”
“I am delighted that I will be working with Collins on this endeavour. Collins’s track record and reputation in the realm of information and knowledge is second to none and is a fantastic home for this book”.
The book will be published in spring 2013.