December 2011
1 post
Offices versus Cubicles, Round 2
Just when you thought the debate between offices and cubicles was closed, new evidence emerges.
Despite the happy talk about collaboration and interaction, the collateral damage of cubicle and open seating arrangements often outweigh the limited advantages. These ideas, intended to be cost-saving, have created an army of management minnions oblivious to the distinctions between intellectual...
May 2011
1 post
WatchEqual to 2,000 Bars of Chocolate? $25,000? 7 More Years of Life? Ron Gutman Recaps Research On The Value Of Your Smile
August 2010
1 post
“Remember: If you reward fire-fighting, you’ll create an organization of...”
– Michael Watkins
July 2010
1 post
What If You Were Wrong?
Get the facts first. You can distort them later. - Mark Twain
Mark Twain was a prescient humorist, especially when it came to politics. But even Twain might have been surprised to learn that the more misinformed we are, the more likely we will use facts proving us wrong to convince ourselves we are even more right.
Unfortunately it’s true: Facts don’t cure misinformation. Instead...
June 2010
1 post
“pithiatism
(noun)
The treatment of certain disorders by persuading the patient...”
– Concise Medical Dictionary from Oxford University Press
April 2010
1 post
The Return of an Ancient Management Secret
It has the power to bridge gaps, to boost confidence, and to give you the courage to risk greater achievement. In all likelihood your mother did it, your grade school teacher did it, and your school teammates did it. But your manager is probably terrified to try it. What is this highly-effective, ancient management secret? Touch. Authentic, comforting, powerful touch.
“This isn’t just...
February 2010
1 post
What In The Heck Is The Zeigarnik Effect?
You’ve had a long day at work yet here you are, working late to cross a few things off your list. Why are you doing this? It’s probably the Zeigarnik Effect.
What’s the Zeigarnik Effect? It’s those intrusive thoughts reminding you of all the things you’ve started but haven’t quite finished. Whether rationally-speaking it’s something you want to finish it...
January 2010
1 post
December 2009
1 post
Strategic Illusions
Have you noticed how optical illusions are similar to business strategy issues? Some, like the illusion to your left, are very obvious when you’re not investigating them closely. You know something is happening, but you can’t find an example to investigate. Some illusions become stronger as you closely investigate them. Others are seen more easily from a distance. Some can be even more...
November 2009
1 post
Monday Morning Performance Booster
The Neuroskeptic points out a recent study seeming to indicate that if someone replaced your normally caffeinated coffee with decaf this morning, you may not notice the difference, but your performance would decline.
The researchers set out to determine if coffee’s impact on performance was more placebo effect than fact, and chose an interesting design to do it. To make sure they were...
October 2009
2 posts
WatchTampering With The Jury.
We attribute emotions and motives to others, and assign credit or blame based on our judgment. How do we do it? And can we change others’ assessments in a consistent way by interfering with their brain’s processing?
Hear scientist Rebecca Saxe on reading others’ minds.
WatchOur perception and other intangibles can completely transform our behavior and the value we place on objects and services, from marketing value to life value. This is an excellent and entertaining TED talk from ad man Rory Sutherland.
September 2009
5 posts
Suppress That Thought (Not!)
Have you ever had a song you just couldn’t get out of your head? Laid awake fretting about your need to fall asleep? Or had some other unwanted thought that simply wouldn’t go away? (…that you then tweeted or posted on FaceBook…? …you know who you are…) Does it feel a bit like, “I have met the enemy, and he is…me?”
Thanks to this post from...
Your Friendlier Future
“Of course they’ll like you! Just get out there, smile and be friendly.”
Sound familiar? The scientifc version of this (or at least one scientific version of it) is known as the Acceptance Prophecy:
If you expect people to like and accept you, they will. If you don’t, they won’t.
I know, it hardly seems fair, right? But fair or not, whether people like and accept...
Flu Season Rx: Be More Sociable
Do people ever ask you, “How do you find the time?” Or maybe, “How did you meet so many people?” If this sounds even a little bit like you, I’m guessing you are healthier than most people. Why?
We used to think that belonging to too many groups, being too sociable, was bad for you. It complicates your life, creates too many demands, and causes stress. Right?
Well...
August 2009
4 posts
True False Confessions
Would you admit guilt for something you didn’t do, just because someone accused you? What if they told you they had video?
In a recently published Applied Cognitive Psychology study, working with a large group of people, all of whom had done nothing wrong, 100% admitted guilt when told there was video evidence of them stealing - or were shown video doctored to make it look like they had...
230?
Have you heard the big buzz about the awesome new Volt EREV scheduled to come out next year?
Chances are if you’ve heard about it, it hasn’t been with a positive spin. I’ve heard about it on NPR, where its not-yet-EPA-verified 230 miles per gallon claims were questioned, and on a few marketing sites critiquing the many missed opportunities of the campaign.
Over at Dim Bulb...
YOU Also Inspire With Music
Do you have friends who say, “I love music, but I can’t play anything.”? I have always been a firm believer that almost everyone has musical talent - they just haven’t had the opportunity to discover what they’re good at yet. And this study confirms my belief. (I love it when that happens.)
It turns out that most everyone has the ability to inspire emotion in...
July 2009
4 posts
Mind Control? →
Vaughan at Mind Hacks has a new post reminiscent of your favorite sci-fi films. Indeed, many world governments are now ordering weapons systems incorporating artificial intelligence.
Maybe you don’t get the blue screen of death quite as often as I do, but this gives it a whole new meaning. In South Africa a software problem with a robot canon carried out that meaning for nine, now-deceased...
The Source of The Economic Crisis →
From the New Yorker, brought to my attention by Jim Collins (of Good to Great and other fame).
“This crisis is the culmination of events and trends reaching back, depending on your perspective, four, seven, seventeen, twenty-two, twenty-seven, thirty-eight, sixty-five, or a hundred and two years. (…) The causes are technological, mathematical, cultural, demographic, financial, economic,...
“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”
– Malcolm Forbes
June 2009
4 posts
Extreme Computing →
Back in late January we talked about new advances in quantum computing. Science’s Jan 23 report talked about scientists’ success in using a qbit’s state of essentially occupying two spaces at the same time to, in essence, teleport it. A baby step perhaps, but pretty exciting stuff.
Now Microsoft has announced the eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) headed by Dan Reed. Formed this...
Does Recession Marketing Spending Really Pay Off? →
“Tell me whether you’ve heard this one,” Christian Shea begins his post in MarketingProfs: “All the research shows that companies that spend on marketing during a recession come out ahead of the competition as the economy rebounds.” But is it really true? Kudos to Christian for challenging the oft-cited but rarely backed-up claim, and for giving us the full disclosure...
Symbols of Crisis
Today I read the closing line of an email telling me that the Chinese symbol for crisis is composed of two intriguing characters. You know how reliable those signature lines are, so I looked it up. Indeed, it’s true.
The first character represents danger or peril of the situation. The second character signifies a crucial point of opportunity. The opportunity is, of course, to take action to...
WatchHow much do facts and data really influence our choices? One of the presentations in my current luncheon series focuses on this very issue, asking participants to choose between two options, based on the same facts. Despite having the same data and the same choices, each half of the audience chooses a different option.
To learn more about why this happens, and recognize other ways you experience...
May 2009
3 posts
The Promise and Peril of Nanotechnology →
“Carbon nanotubes are smaller and harder than asbestos fibers, making it easier for them to enter the lungs and likely to cause far greater damage once there. Yet there are no standards for controlling them as a potential hazard in the lab or end-products.”
I was startled when I read this over five years ago in Science News. The article featured past discoveries and technologies with...
The Strange Pull of Synchronicity →
I still recollect that first meeting perfectly: a room filled with over a hundred well-dressed business owners, executives, and a few retirees belting out,
“Old MacDonald had a farm, E - I - E - I - O,
And on that farm he had a…”
Why was this group of otherwise sane executives oinking, quacking and singing together? This ritual of sometimes-strange singing synchronicity is a...
“Our job is not to answer questions, it’s to ask the right...”
– Bill Buxton
April 2009
8 posts
My Faulty First Impression
Wow, I was expecting something totally different. Yes, from Susan Boyle, but also from Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter post this morning referencing her, with a link, saying this was another reason he believes all interviews should be done by phone.
Yes, I thought. Exactly. Susan Boyle is an excellent example of how our brains look for shortcuts, forming our opinions long before we realize...
“Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.”
– Will Rogers
WatchDan Ariely, author of the fascinating book Predictably Irrational, talks here about why sometimes we think it is OK to cheat and steal, and why we should test our intuition. Another great TED talk.
“Get the facts first. You can distort them later.”
– Mark Twain
“Say you are looking at a chess board. Is there anything you can’t see? No....”
– Paul Van Riper, retired Marine (and Red Team leader of devastating Blue Team 2002 Joint Forces JFCOM attack)
Smile! You'll Feel Better →
Dave Munger talks about a series of experiments that seem to indicate the truth of this advice. Smiling will actually help you feel better. Find out why at Cognitive Daily. (Note: This is no easy thing to test because of the need to disassociate the request to smile from the actual impact of the smiling itself. So why not trying smiling before you click on that link?)
WatchThe Neurological Basis for your ability to think systemically. Fantastic TED talk by neuroscientist VS Ramachandran, author of Phantoms in the Brain on what neuroscience tells us about inter-relationships in the brain and our ability to make connections and spot similarities in disparate input. Watch until the end, when he pulls it all together beautifully. Covers Capgras Delusion, Phantom Limb...
“ “People prefer to buy what they need from people who understand what it...”
– Bill Brooks in You’re Working Too Hard to Make the Sale, as quoted by Charles Green in Rain Today’s The Great Myth of Sales: Why Logic and Value Propositions Matter Less Than You Think
March 2009
8 posts
Projecting Leadership
What has a greater influence on being perceived as a leader? Your ability, or your willingness to speak up?
Gavin Kilduff, a Ph.D candidate at UC Berkeley, has been working very hard on the question of how leaders and winners are determined in the workplace, particularly in the context of rivalry. Recently, a study he and professor Cameron Anderson published in the February 2009 Journal of...
Must remember...must remember →
Any of us who have ever been in school remember that stressed-out ”I MUST REMEMBER THIS” feeling. Now I am comforted to know that I may have been doing myself some good by triggering those thoughts. A group of German scientists recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that certain activations in your brain (theta waves) actually do...
Two Days In One →
During World War II, Winston Churchill took nearly two hours to nap every day, even going so far as to get undressed and crawl under the covers. He insisted that his nap was essential, and allowed him to fit two days into every one.
Sleep is essential to stamina, and to good decision-making. And what better day to ponder these facts than National Nap Day?
Having a little trouble justifying that...
The Power To Change Minds →
“Elegance delivers the power to cut through the noise. It can shake markets. It can change minds, and mindsets.”
- Matthew May, In Pursuit of Elegance, Why The Best Ideas Have Something Missing
Elegance is about what we leave out. The crucial pieces that enhance meaning with their absence.
A couple of days ago Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen) Tweeted a link to Matt May’s...
Watch“Thousands in this world have lived without love. None have lived without water.”
Businesses and the economy are systems, just as life on earth is a system. In an Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore and Nancy Duarte awakened a sense of urgency about how we are damaging one part of that system. In this TED talk, Sylvia Earle and Nancy Duarte show us how we’re damaging another crucial...
The Dark Side of Goal-Setting →
In difficult times we see a lot of advice about what to do, and a lot of that involves setting goals to do whatever it is the author is advising. While goals can be inspiring and useful for managing the tactical day-to-day, they have a dark side too. A dark side we spend too little time talking about.
As crafters of even the most successful and sophisticated sales compensation plans can...
February 2009
3 posts
Do I Need To Be More Blue? →
Feeling like you need a little more creativity? Imagination? Want to inspire more positive and proactive suggestions? Or just hang on to your party guests a little longer? Then blue is for you according to researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Michigan.
On the other hand, if you want to be perceived as more attractive, to increase your edge in a close...
WatchA wise person knows how to make the exception to every rule. A wise person knows how to use moral rules to serve other people, not to manipulate them. A wise person is like a jazz musician, using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand. A wise person is made, not born. Wisdom requires experience. You...