Q: How many randomly-chosen people would need to be in the same room to virtually guarantee two of them share the same birthday? A: 75 (99.9% probability) This unintuitive answer is known as the birthday paradox. The earliest known publication of the birthday paradox was in 1939 by the mathematician Richard von Mises. However, there…
You should always get the bigger pizza. No, this isn’t some bigger-is-better American standard where size matters more than quality or consistency. It’s not because everyone loves pizza so you might as well get more of it (it’s the glutamate we find so irresistible). And I’m definitely not using the number of slices rule that…
Shrinkflation happens when companies keep the price of an overall package the same while reducing the size or quantity of the items in the package. The word is a portmanteau of the words shrink and inflation. The first use of the term is often attributed to Pippa Malmgren. Shrinkflation is a sneaky way to combat…
In these days of extremisms on all sides, I’ve been thinking about the power of a committed few. In particular, what percentage of a population is required to change the perception of the majority? Alternatively, when does an idea shift from the minority to the majority? We tend to think of social progress and change…
What are your top 5 cult classics? For nearly 30 years, a good friend and I have had an on-going debate on the greatest movie line of all time. Spoiler alert: not surprisingly, mine is Sharks related. This year, we decided to start a new tradition and began debating the best cult classics of all…
If you want someone to achieve a goal, you should give them a head start – even if that head start is really just an illusion. Loyalty programs are based on the idea that consumers are more likely to repeat purchase if they are given incentives to reach specific goals with well-defined rewards. A classic…
For many years, my routine was a Sunday hike followed by a Sunday blog. For a variety of reasons, both my hiking and blogging have become erratic. After skipping yet another Sunday hike, I was surprised to find that I still had exceeded 10,000 steps per day for the past week. 10,000 is the number…
With more than 114M viewers, Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 was the most-watched broadcast in the U.S. according to Nielsen ratings. The next four Super Bowls had declining ratings, with 2019’s Super Bowl XLII yielding only 98M viewers – the lowest since 2009. The overnight ratings for this year’s Super Bowl suggest the trend was…
I’m a big proponent of using scorecards to monitor progress to well-defined objectives. Earlier in my career, I ran a software company that used scorecards to help dozens of companies around the world ensure their execution was in line with their strategy. When using scorecards, I’ve cautioned that unless you compare yourself against an external…
A common misconception about school is that it teaches us how to learn. However, in my opinion, school doesn’t teach us how to learn, it teaches us how to pass tests. We pull all-nighters, cramming information into our brains, to ensure we have facts memorized. Often, we forget what we “learned” as soon as the…