In 2018, the celebrated biotechnology startup Theranos collapsed from a market valuation of over $9 billion into bankruptcy and felony charges against its superstar founder, Elizabeth Holmes. This spectacular failure was due in large part to the silencing of dissenting voices who challenged the dubious claims and questionable decisions by Theranos leadership. Similar catastrophic examples can be found in business, the military and other human activities. Modern Devil’s Advocacy is a form of challenge analysis that’s intended to help overcome our human bias and fallacious reasoning, disrupt groupthink, reduce risk, and achieve better outcomes. By creating a strong counter case to any decision, modern Devil’s Advocates can help others see potential weaknesses in their assumptions, beliefs, and judgments. This book will show you how practically anyone from the CEO to the newly minted manager can and should think and act like a modern Devil’s Advocate. You will learn the origin of modern Devil’s Advocacy, why the practice is desperately needed today, and how to apply modern Devil’s Advocacy in any setting. If you want to learn how to constructively challenge the judgments that you and others make and achieve better outcomes, then this book is for you.

If you're ready to break free of groupthink, challenge the majority view and make better decisions, then this book is for you.The popular, majority view often decides what's best in everything from entertainment to business practices. Time and again, however, we've seen how going along with the crowd can lead to dissatisfying or disastrous results. If only we had taken the time to seek a thoughtful dissenting opinion. Devils in the Details calls for the rise of modern Devil's Advocacy to help reduce risk and manage uncertainty. Through discussion and examples, this book challenges decision-makers from the CEO to the newly minted manager to think and act like a modern Devil's Advocate. Inside you'll discover: The origin of devil's advocacy and why modern Devil's Advocates are needed today Why we need to regularly challenge our formal processes, including so-called best practices Different kinds of thinking and common biases and fallacies that can cloud our decision-making How to create real arguments with premises that support reasoned conclusions Practical tools from simple lists to dynamic simulation models, their strengths and weaknesses How to embrace modern Devil's Advocacy for diverse and useful dissent without impeding progress Early Reviews ====== "A worthwhile addition to the library of anyone who is responsible for crucial decision-making." Kristan J. Wheaton, Professor of Strategic Futures and author of The Warning Solution: Intelligent Analysis in the Age of Information "A marvelous piece of work." Gene Bellinger, organizational theorist, systems thinking and knowledge management About the Author ====== Robert Koshinskie is the principal of Ringbolt Consulting where he assists clients in product and marketing management, new product development and launch, and business analysis and strategy. He is a mentor in the NSF I-Corps Program and the creator and instructor for a decision-making seminar through NC State University Division of Continuing and Professional Education.

'The Devil's Advocate' brings a fresh approach to the do's and don'ts of good advocacy. Written with humour and style, the title explains clear techniques, taking the reader through the practical application of advocacy step-by-step.

Satan is not God’s enemy in the Bible, and he’s not always bad—much less evil. Through the lens of the Old and New Testaments, Erik Butler explores the Devil in literature, theology, visual art, and music from antiquity up to the present, discussing canonical authors (Dante, Milton, and Goethe among them) and a wealth of lesser-known sources. Since his first appearance in the Book of Job, Satan has pursued a single objective: to test human beings, whose moral worth and piety leave plenty of room for doubt. Satan can be manipulative, but at worst he facilitates what mortals are inclined to do anyway. “The Devil made me do it” does not hold up in the court of cosmic law. With wit and surprising examples, this book explains why.

'Created’ by Steven Spielberg yet officially directed by Tobe Hooper, Poltergeist (1982) can be best described as ‘family horror movie’ both in its target audience and in its narrative context, the story of an All-American suburban family, the Freelings, whose home suddenly becomes the site of a spectacular haunting, apparently summoned by their young daughter. The film is somewhat of an anachronism and this Devil's Advocate explores this in both the scope of production and narrative. The book discusses the duality of the text highlighting debates surrounding both Spielberg's somewhat saccharine portrayal of middle-class Americana and his more subversive cinematic endeavours. The duality of the text also will also be discussed in the context of the film's production – with both Spielberg and Hooper on set for much of the time, the result was a movie with the production values, effects and marketing of a high budget mainstream cinema blockbuster apparently directed by a subversive 'grindhouse' cinema auteur. Yet Poltergeist is neither nor both of those things, instead being a unique hybrid of genres and styles taking the best and worst from both aspects of family blockbuster and cult horror film, and as such can be seen as a text that is something unique – a classic modern take on the traditional haunted house story.

Originally published: New York: Morrow, 1959.

Stories of witchcraft and demonic possession from early modern England through the last official trials in colonial New England Those possessed by the devil in early modern England usually exhibited a common set of symptoms: fits, vomiting, visions, contortions, speaking in tongues, and an antipathy to prayer. However, it was a matter of interpretation, and sometimes public opinion, if these symptoms were visited upon the victim, or if they came from within. Both early modern England and colonial New England had cases that blurred the line between witchcraft and demonic possession, most famously, the Salem witch trials. While historians acknowledge some similarities in witch trials between the two regions, such as the fact that an overwhelming majority of witches were women, the histories of these cases primarily focus on local contexts and specifics. In so doing, they overlook the ways in which manhood factored into possession and witchcraft cases. Vexed with Devils is a cultural history of witchcraft-possession phenomena that centers on the role of men and patriarchal power. Erika Gasser reveals that witchcraft trials had as much to do with who had power in the community, to impose judgement or to subvert order, as they did with religious belief. She argues that the gendered dynamics of possession and witchcraft demonstrated that contested meanings of manhood played a critical role in the struggle to maintain authority. While all men were not capable of accessing power in the same ways, many of the people involved—those who acted as if they were possessed, men accused of being witches, and men who wrote possession propaganda—invoked manhood as they struggled to advocate for themselves during these perilous times. Gasser ultimately concludes that the decline of possession and witchcraft cases was not merely a product of change over time, but rather an indication of the ways in which patriarchal power endured throughout and beyond the colonial period. Vexed with Devils reexamines an unnerving time and offers a surprising new perspective on our own, using stories and voices which emerge from the records in ways that continue to fascinate and unsettle us.