If I was a millennial, I would be annoyed with popular media. Whether they are called Millennials, Digital Natives, or Generation Y, people under the age of 30 are typically portrayed as having unrealistically high expectations for their career and over-inflated sense of their abilities. They are lazy, lack emotional intelligence, and don’t take criticism well. But they…
Possibly because my mantra is ‘words matter’ or that I’ve been writing continuously for many years, I get asked for tips on better writing. For years, I quoted George Orwell’s advice on how to be simple and clear, including my personal favorite: If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out….
The English word upset has multiple definitions. The most common implies an anxious uneasiness; as in “I am too upset to say anything.” This emotional version also has a physical equivalent; “My stomach is too upset to eat anything.” In sports and in politics, an upset is to defeat a seemingly better opponent. My favorite…
To prepare for the upcoming holiday shopping season, I’m reading ‘Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)‘ by William Poundstone. Poundstone references a wide variety of psychology studies which show consumers are unable to accurately estimate fair prices and are “strongly influenced by the unconscious, irrational, and politically incorrect.”…
I know this will be an unpopular point of view but I’m just going to say it: Brainstorming is a bad idea that usually doesn’t work. Brainstorming advocates claim groups of people are more likely to find solutions to problems than individuals working alone. The idea was popularized in the 1950’s by advertising executive Alex…
Q: What do the Southwest Airlines boarding process and the video game Halo have in common?A: They both rely on swarm intelligence to improve their experience. Swarm intelligence describes the behavior of a population of simple agents whose aggregate behavior exhibits intelligence unknown to the individual agents. Groups exhibiting swarm intelligence have no central leader…
Next week I’ll be in China for our second annual customer meeting. One of the things that makes this event special is we didn’t try to export the US version to China but rather built an event ground up for China. As Chinese consumers gain affluence, we expect them to act like Westerners and are…
During the U.S. 4th of July break, I finally read a stack of articles I had put aside months ago. I was most absorbed by the Time Magazine cover article ‘10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life.’ You can read each of the ideas by clicking on the links below, but for those of you who…
There is both an art and science to timing decisions. In the book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argued we should trust our snap judgments to make decision. He used examples from science, advertising, medicine and music to show that spontaneous decisions were as good as, and often better than, carefully considered ones. While Blink became a…
I’ve never worked in the food service industry but I’m fascinated by the psychology of tipping. In the U.S. tipping is voluntary but expected; partly due to social convention and partly because food servers depend on tips to make a living. Because U.S. food servers are required to pay income tax on the value of…