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Think Like A Freak
The third installment of the highly successful series and another New York Times bestseller, Think Like A Freak is Levitt and Dubner’s latest—and most revolutionary—book. Taking their successful Freakonomics ideas to the next level, Levitt and Dubner offer an engaging and innovative new program sure to inspire and enlighten audiences. Each idea presented by Levitt and Dubner will be illustrated by a story or example, in their ever-popular counterintuitive style, that will provide your audience with illuminating thoughts for profitable thinking. With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, they take us inside their thought process and teach us all to think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally—to think, that is, like a Freak.
Business & Management Lessons from Freakonomics & SuperFreakonomics
In this engaging presentation, Levitt & Dubner address the fact that the old rules of business just don’t apply and therefore the ideas they have presented in Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics make even more sense now than they did a few years ago. It’s a new world, and that demands a new way of thinking. They offer audiences a way of getting beneath the surface of modern business practices. Using humor and first-rate storytelling, they discuss the sort of topics that are on every business person’s mind these days: the ways to create behavior change, the incentives that work and don’t work, and the value of asking unpopular questions. The difference between the Freakonomics presentation and other "economic" presentations is that while most economics presentations present great tools for coming up with answers, they don’t come up with the interesting questions. This presentation offers both. Here is a sample of additional questions that Levitt & Dubner address:
- Why is behavior change so difficult? How can I change the behavior of my employees? Why are our incentive programs not working?
- How can I capture more customers from my competitors? How can I influence current customers to increase loyalty?
- Why am I not getting the project outcomes I expected? How do I keep the tyranny of emotion, opinion and anecdote out of my project plan?
- Why is consensus building often a waste of time and resources?
Freakonomics and the Power of Incentives
No matter what your program theme, consider bringing Levitt and Dubner to put a unique spin on any topic as incentives are key to all of them. Their presentations are as entertaining as they are illuminating as they offer data-based stories that show audiences how to inspire change in their own company and community. But in order to change aspects of our world, we first have to understand it. Believe it or not, if we can understand the incentives that lead a schoolteacher to cheat, we can understand how the global economic crisis has come to pass.
Authors of Freakonomics
- Bestselling Authors, Freakonomics Series - Co-stars, Freakonomics Documentary
Steven Levitt
Steven Levitt is a full professor in the University of Chicago's economics department (he received tenure after only two years) and the winner of the highly esteemed John Bates Clark Medal, as the most influential economist in America under the age of 40 (which is frequently a precursor to the Nobel Prize). Mr. Levitt has an enormous curiosity and is set on course by personal experiences and the incongruities he sees in everyday life. The Wall Street Journal has said, “If Indiana Jones were an economist, he'd be Steven Levitt.” When Stephen Dubner (co-author of Freakonomics) profiled Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, he was beset by questions, queries, riddles and requests - from General Motors and the New York Yankees to U.S. senators but also from prisoners and parents and a man who sold bagels. Mr. Levitt is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else has found and devises ways to measure an effect that veteran economists have declared unmeasurable. He has shown other economists just how well their tools can make sense of the real world.
Stephen Dubner
After Stephen Dubner profiled the economist Steven Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, thats when they decided to team up and write the book that became Freakonomics. An award-winning author, journalist, and TV personality, Dubner has been an editor and writer at The New York Times, taught English at Columbia University, appeared regularly on Good Morning America and World News Tonight, and, in college, he started a rock band that was signed to Arista Records. He is the author of two previous books, Choosing My Religion and Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper, as well as a childrens book, The Boy With Two Belly Buttons.
![Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything](/media/legacy/books/Freakonomics_Freakonomics.jpg)
