As soon as I finished reading Daniel Willingham’s fascinating book Why Don’t Students Like School?, I immediately put it on my list to blog about. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, applies the principles of cognitive psychology to the world of education. Essentially, his goal is explain to teachers how their students’ brains…
When apparel retailer Gap releases a new clothing design, marketing analysts look to a key customer segment as an early indicator of the product’s popularity: the people who work in its stores. “Our employees are also our target audience, so we know quickly by those first-day employee purchases if we have a hit on our…
We always seem to be on a search for cause. In college my statistics professor’s favorite expression was “correlation does not imply causation.” In case you’re not familiar with the phrase, I’ll borrow the explanation I learned in school: When male college students wake up with a headache, a large percentage of the time they…
Ever notice that food tastes better when someone else makes it for you? In the fourth annual Food and Drink issue of the NY Times magazine, noted psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains: When you make your own sandwich, you anticipate its taste as you’re working on it. And when you think of a particular food for…
For Scotts Miracle-Gro, social media has proven to be an effective brand fertilizer. According to Beth Dockins, director of customer service, many of the company’s customers prefer to tweet or Facebook a picture of their issue over having to talk about their lawn problems on the phone. But social media can just as quickly open…
For reasons I’d rather not go into, I decided to do a little research into food poisoning with a seemingly simple question: How does food get poisoned? It turns out most food-related illnesses can be separated into two types: toxins and infection. The traditional use of the term food poisoning stems from the existence of…
Comedian Richard Lewis claims to have coined the “_______ from hell” phrase, but Carnival Cruise Lines has lived it. In 2012, Carnival spent $61 million advertising its “fun ship” brand positioning. But by the end of last year, #cruisefromhell was trending on Twitter after one of Carnival’s ships had an on-board fire that left passengers…
Early in my management career, the HR department sent out a single-question survey which asked how satisfied we were with our jobs on a scale of 0 (very unsatisfied) to 4 (highly satisfied). To my surprise, my group had the lowest average score (2.6) in the company. The HR VP predicted a mass exodus and told…
“It’s true I deceived you but I wasn’t lying.” The statement, spoken brazenly by a work colleague, momentarily floored me. They claimed they were deceiving without lying but I thought deception and lying were the same thing. A little bit of research suggests there may be a difference. In ‘Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in…
Ever watch those TV infomercials late at night when you’re bored and can’t sleep? Of course you do. And you’re likely to buy things you don’t really need as well. ‘But Wait… There’s More’ – the most fascinating book I’ve read in a long time – explains the science behind infomercials. Virtually every element of…