While we are taught how to read words and sentences when we are young, we are rarely taught how to read paragraphs or books. And most of us don’t realize there are different levels of reading. The fascinating and useful How To Read A Book is subtitled “The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading.” The authors…
It might be time to debunk the Dunning-Kruger effect. For those who may not be familiar, in the 1990s Cornell University professors David Dunning and Justin Kruger conducted a now-famous experiment to test whether incompetent people were unaware of their incompetence. In the study, the lowest-scoring participants estimated they did better than 62% of everyone else, while the highest-scoring…
If you’re a fan of whodunnit murder mysteries (and even if you aren’t), you’ve likely heard the phrase: the butler did it. It’s shorthand for a seemingly common plot which goes like this: A group of people are invited to a dinner at a wealthy person’s private estate and the wealthy person is killed while…
You might not have heard of MIT professor Gian-Carlo Rota but you should know Rota’s 10 Life Lessons. Rota was an internationally respected mathematician and philosopher, and an influential and admired teacher. He was credited with transforming the field of combinatorial logic into one with a wide range industrial applications – from computers to communications…
There are many frequently debated but ultimately unanswerable questions such as leader vs manager and strategy vs execution. One that gets less attention – but is just as important – is the question: rules or standards? In law, the distinction is clear and the choice is somewhat obvious. Rules differentiate legal from illegal behavior, hopefully…
Would you eat an Antarctic toothfish? Probably not. It’s an ugly-looking human-sized fish with an unappetizing sounding name. But chances are you have eaten it. That’s because the seafood industry has mastered the art of rebranding. In the 1970s, American seafood entrepreneur Lee Lantz realized a fish with buttery white flesh and a mild, non-fishy…
If you tell a brazen untruth, is it called a bald-faced lie or a bold-faced lie? 100 years ago, the answer might have been neither, as the phrase barefaced lie was in fashion. Barefaced literally means beardless but implied bold or even brazen, perhaps because it was unacceptable for a man not to have a…
I’m not gaslighting you. We’re at an inflection point of people quiet quitting irregardless if everything is amazing and moving forward. Does that make sense? Absolutely! Since 1976, Lake Superior State University (LSSU) has compiled an annual list of words to be banned. For years, it was described as words to be “banished from the…
After I watched Top Gun: Maverick, I called a Navy Pilot friend to ask what he thought about the movie. His response: “At the end of the film, there’s no way the F14 could have gotten airborne with such a short run. Without a catapult, it needs about half a mile (2500 feet) to take…
If branding is the art of differentiation, blanding might be the science of imitation. We’re witnessing the blanding of brands. Blanding, a term coined in 2018, happens when a challenger brand drafts on the brand recognition of a larger and more established competitor by using similar brand identification (fonts, colors, imagery). Blanding was popularized by…