My Book 'Hypothesis-Driven Action' Comes Out on 12/4

I will be publishing a book called "Hypothesis-Driven Action" on Wednesday, December 4, 2024.

Following "Raising Your Resolution", it is a book written for businesspeople in general, and as the title says, this time it is about hypotheses.

仮説行動――マップ・ループ・リープで学びを最大化し、大胆な未来を実現する

My Motivation

Some of you may be wondering, "There are already so many books about hypotheses, so why write yet another one?"

For example, there are books that have been read for a long time, such as "Hypothesis-Driven Thinking" (published in 2006), which has sold more than 200,000 copies, and even now several books about hypotheses come out every year.

Amid all that, I had several reasons for deciding to publish this book. The two main ones are as follows.

• I wanted to compile the basic way of thinking about hypotheses
• I wanted to compile how to handle hypotheses in startups and new businesses

The former came from my wish to refine the way of thinking about hypotheses we have had so far a little more and make it more general.

As for the latter, I had a feeling that the way of using and handling hypotheses needed when doing "something new", as startups do, is a little different from that in conventional books on hypotheses, so I put that part together.

As a result, I think I was able to bring out something somewhat different from books on hypotheses that implicitly assumed consulting firms and large corporations.

What Makes This Book Different

Much of it is common ground, but I think the following three points differ greatly from conventional books.

• Emphasis on action rather than thought
• How to make a hypothesis a reality
• How to create a big hypothesis

I have also written about the other differences at the beginning of the book, so please do read it.

At a time when many people and students are being asked to do "something new", I hope that something in this book will be useful to many of them.

Thoughts on the Book Cover

The publisher is Eiji Press, and the cover was designed by tobufune. Both of them handled this book as well, following "Implementing the Future" and "Raising Your Resolution".

The dynamic lettering on the cover looks as if it expresses "action", and the movement in which the letters seem to be gradually corrected gives the impression of moving toward a more correct answer through hypothesis testing.

I think it will stand out in bookstores this time too.

I hear that quite a few orders have already come in from bookstores. Please pick it up at a bookstore. And to everyone at the bookstores, thank you in advance for your support.

Behind the Scenes of Writing (Very Late...)

As I wrote in an article about two years ago, this book is content that I had planned to include in "Raising Your Resolution". Since I had already written a fair amount of it as of 2022, I actually wanted to publish it in 2023, and a January 2023 article on NewsPicks even mentioned that it would come out in 2023, but my main job was busy and it took far more time than expected.

On the other hand, I think the content has become considerably more refined than it was back then.

If what was inside "Raising Your Resolution" was version 1, it is now about version 3. The content that was 80,000 characters in version 1 swelled to as many as about 300,000 characters after I added various things, and in the end it landed at a book of just under 200,000 characters. The average business book is said to be 100,000 characters, so this is about twice that length.

Yet the price is only a little higher than that of a typical book, so please think of it as a good deal, with "two books' worth on a character-count basis" and "both a basic part and an advanced part included" (laughs), and do pick it up.

Toward the Next Book

In my own mind, I call my previous book the "Resolution book" and this one the "Hypothesis book", and I am writing them as books for businesspeople in general.

In addition to these, I would also like to write a "Resource book" on the theme of resourcefulness, and I think that with those three books I will have finished putting together the books for business in general that abstract startup know-how. I am slowly writing that one as well, so I hope you will wait for it patiently.

(I would also like to compile my blog articles on careers and so on... but who knows when that will happen.)

In Closing

Once again, "Hypothesis-Driven Action" goes on sale on 12/4. If you are interested, please do pre-order it. I think the Kindle edition will also come out soon.

Through this book, I would be glad if I can convey not only how to find "small, correct hypotheses for the present", but also how to "create bold hypotheses about the future and bring them to reality".

(Supplement) Related Slides

I would like to publish slides for "Hypothesis-Driven Action" at some point, as I did for "Raising Your Resolution", but I am not sure when I can write them, so for now I am introducing some existing slides about hypotheses. I made them over the 2020 year-end and New Year holidays, when I had some free time after finishing the proofreading of "Implementing the Future", so they are about four years old and differ a little from my current thinking...