Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

plan everything in advance This method of planning is often known as a “waterfall approach,” because it is a sequential design methodology in which progress “flows” downward from conception to initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing, production/implementation, and maintenance. At the core of this approach is the belief that each stage can be anticipated and scheduled.

unfettered themselves In response to a fact-checking email, Fulgham expanded his comments: “I assigned the CTO (Jeff Johnson) as the day to day executive for oversight. We hired an Agile Scrum Master (Mark Crandall) to serve as a coach and mentor (not as a project manager). We created an open physical workspace in the basement that allowed collaborative communications between team members. We assigned three Cyber Special Agents as the front end development leads, and the Director, Deputy Director and I empowered them to recommend any process improvements and/or form consolidations (in order not to just digitize any potentially outdated processes/forms). I worked with the CEOs of our top vendors for the products that were going to make up Sentinel to get their support and their best cleared personnel. The team adopted (under Mark’s coaching) the agile methodology. All FBI stakeholders were part of the business side of the Sentinel team to ensure their needs were met. The technical team conducted self directed two-week sprints. We had nightly automated builds. A dedicated QA team was located with the development team, and I held a meeting every two weeks to view fully functional code (no mockups) and personally signed off on requirements. All stakeholders, the DOJ, the DOJ IG, the White House and other interested government agencies, attended these demo days to observe our progress and process.”

solve thousands of crimes In response to a fact-checking email, a spokeswoman for the FBI wrote, regarding Sentinel: “We are not predicting crime. We may identify trends and threats.”

“is capable of” Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time (New York: Crown Business, 2014).

“cultural mindset” Robert S. Mueller III, “Statement Before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,” Washington, D.C., October 6, 2011, https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/the-state-of-intelligence-reform-10-years-after-911.





CHAPTER SIX: DECISION MAKING


worth $450,000 Throughout this chapter, chips are referred to by their notional dollar value. However, it is important to note that in tournaments like this one, chips are tokens that are collected to determine winners—they are not traded in for cash on a one-to-one basis. Rather, prize money is paid out based on how someone places in the competition. So someone could have $200,000 in chips and take fifth place in a tournament and win $300,000, for instance. In this particular tournament, the prize was $2 million and, by coincidence, the total number of chips was also $2 million.

prize for second place The 2004 Tournament of Champions is described in slightly different chronological order than what occurred in order to highlight the salient points of each hand. Beyond describing hands out of order, no other facts have been changed. For my understanding of the 2004 Tournament of Champions as well as poker more generally, I am indebted to Annie Duke, Howard Lederer, and Phil Hellmuth for their time and advice. In addition, this account relies upon the taped version of the 2004 TOC, provided by ESPN; Annie Duke, with David Diamond, How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker (New York: Hudson Street Press, 2005); “Annie Duke: The Big Things You Don’t Do,” The Moth Radio Hour, September 13, 2012, http://themoth.org/posts/stories/the-big-things-you-dont-do; “Annie Duke: A House Divided,” The Moth Radio Hour, July 20, 2011, http://themoth.org/posts/stories/a-house-divided; “Dealing with Doubt,” Radiolab, season 11, episode 4, http://www.radiolab.org/story/278173-dealing-doubt/; Dina Cheney, “Flouting Convention, Part II: Annie Duke Finds Her Place at the Poker Table,” Columbia College Today, July 2004, http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct_archive/jul04/features4.php; Ginia Bellafante, “Dealt a Bad Hand? Fold ’Em. Then Raise,” The New York Times, January 19, 2006; Chuck Darrow, “Annie Duke, Flush with Success,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 8, 2010; Jamie Berger, “Annie Duke, Poker Pro,” Columbia Magazine, March 4, 2013, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Spring2002/Duke.html; “Annie Duke Profile,” The Huffington Post, February 21, 2013; Del Jones, “Know Yourself, Know Your Rival,” USA Today, July 20, 2009; Richard Deitsch, “Q&A with Annie Duke,” Sports Illustrated, May 26, 2005; Mark Sauer, “Annie Duke Found Her Calling,” San Diego Union-Tribune, October 9, 2005; George Sturgis Coffin, Secrets of Winning Poker (Wilshire, 1949); Richard D. Harroch and Lou Krieger, Poker for Dummies (New York: Wiley, 2010); David Sklansky, The Theory of Poker (Two Plus Two Publishers, 1999); Michael Bowling et al., “Heads-Up Limit Hold’em Poker Is Solved,” Science 347, no. 6218 (2015): 145–49; Darse Billings et al., “The Challenge of Poker,” Artificial Intelligence 134, no. 1 (2002): 201–40; Kevin B. Korb, Ann E. Nicholson, and Nathalie Jitnah, “Bayesian Poker,” Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1999).

she was going to win Gerald Hanks, “Poker Math and Probability,” Pokerology, http://www.pokerology.com/lessons/math-and-probability/.

win a Nobel Prize Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,” Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society 47, no. 2 (1979): 263–91.

a million television viewers The tournament drew an estimated 1.5 million viewers.

She’s not sure Annie, in a phone call to check facts in this chapter, expanded upon her thinking: “If Greg had jacks or better, I was in a bad situation. I was very undecided about the hand he could be holding, and I was in a situation where I really did have to create more certainty for myself. I really needed to decide if he had aces or kings, and then fold. Also, Greg Raymer, at that point, was an unknown quantity, but my brother and I had been watching videotapes of him play, and we had seen what we thought was a “tell,” something he did physically when he had a good hand, and I saw him do this particular thing that suggested to me that he had a strong hand. That’s not a certain thing, you don’t know if a tell is 100 percent, but it helped tip me into thinking he had a strong hand.”

“intelligence forecasts” “Aggregative Contingent Estimation,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence (IARPA), 2014, Web.

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