With the recent news of the Suez Canal being blocked by a massive container ship, I was reminded of the intriguing story of how the Panama Canal almost wasn’t built in Panama. For those who may not know, the Panama Canal is a 51-mile-long passage built in 1914 which connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans….
A wicked problem is so complex that you don’t really understand the problem until there’s a solution. The concept of a wicked problem was formalized in 1973 in the discipline of social planning and public policy. The use of the word ‘wicked’ doesn’t imply evil but rather the resistance of the problem to being solved….
Q: What do you call a group of sharks?A: A shiver of sharks. Of course, because seeing Sharks make you shiver. Shiver is an example of a collective noun; the name for a group of things. As I’ve often used animal stories to help illustrate specific points, reinforce behaviors, or to provide colorful rallying cries,…
If you adopt the language of an active mindset, you might act more decisively and take more responsibility for your actions. People with a passive mindset tend to shirk responsibility and think that life happens to them. They aren’t in control what happens. This attitude is reflective in their language: “It’s not my fault I…
We all know we yawn when we are sleepy or bored. But we also yawn because we’re stressed, not just when we are tired. Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and author of Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond, believes yawning is a displacement activity. Displacement activities are unexpected and often unintended behaviors which happen when…
Friendship might be the key to well-being. We all recognize having strong relationships is important for our well being. The world is filled with advice on how to improve your relationship with your family, your coworkers, and your romantic partner. But there’s precious little information on how to make and maintain friends. That’s too bad…
When I was a marketer, I enjoyed poking fun at my own profession. While marketing is often criticized, my humor was based on pride. There’s even evidence that self-deprecation is linked to wellbeing. With that in mind, here are 10 humorous riddles for marketers. In fact, maybe marketers are the only ones who will truly…
Ever wonder where the phrase ‘right as rain’ comes from? In English the phrase implies that everything is satisfactory, usually applied to good health. The phrase is often used as a contrast: He was quite ill last week but he’s right as rain now. Like many common English phrases, its origin isn’t clear. It was…
People often hold on to their beliefs, despite evidence to the contrary. Someone once even said to me ‘don’t confuse me with facts.’ Beliefs trump facts. The Javna Brothers’ Life Is A Joke book has an entertaining story which describes the phenomena. Here’s my summary of the full version: A man is convinced he’s dead….
The commonly-accepted practice of employee ranking can be dangerous to company culture. Ranking employees, also known as stacked or forced ranking, is a process which compares individual employees to each other, typically associated with annual performance reviews. Employees are usually forced into one of three buckets: A (top 20%), B (the middle 70%), and C…