Welcome to the future. It is a common complaint that we were promised jetpacks and flying cars but all we got was… something less cool. But the complaints are mostly unwarranted. Things that seemed like science fiction not long ago are now commonplace (or soon will be): under-the-skin GPS, 3D printing, hoverboards, lab-grown leather, self-heating…
For reasons not worth getting into, this past week I was reminded of a decade-old HBS discussion entitled “How Much of Leadership Is About Control, Delegation, or Theater?” The original discussion was prompted by a claim from Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer that leaders only explain 10% of a company’s performance. Instead, a company’s current performance…
Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom. -George S. Patton Motivational quotes like that can be inspirational but not very practical. Intellectually we know bad times eventually come to an end. But why is it that some people seem to bounce back more quickly than others? The authors of Stronger: Develop the…
People tend to be precise with small numbers and imprecise with larger ones. Young kids love to explain that they are not 4 years old but rather 4 and a half – with an emphasis on the half. But hardly anyone says they are 54 and a half. They might not even admit they are…
Research shows we can’t trust our own memories. Many of us probably think our individual experiences (sights, sounds, and feelings) are saved intact in our brains. A loose analogy might be a video camera recording everything it sees to a flash drive. When the time comes to remember something, we just play it back from…
I’m a big believer that culture eats strategy so I’ve been planning to read the book Fish Can’t See Water for a while. When it got to the top of my reading queue earlier this summer, I started researching the authors Kai Hammerich and Richard D. Lewis. As happens more often than I might like to…
Dutch psychologist Aldert Vrij can tell if you’re lying. Vrij has published more than 500 articles on using verbal and non-verbal cues for lie detection. His book Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities has been called “the most comprehensive review of deception to date.” At more than 500 pages, it’s not only comprehensive, it’s…
A few years ago I wrote an article based on Wendy Wood’s theory that the key to breaking a habit is to break the routine associated with it. For example, Wood found college students were more successful in breaking their television habit if the TV were placed in an unfamiliar location. I joked that I…
Why do people make decisions that don’t seem to make sense? Game theory provides a potential answer called the prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma explains why people make decisions which are good for themselves but not for the team. Even if you didn’t learn about it in economics class, you probably recognize the prisoners’ dilemma…
What’s up with how people act in elevators? When two people who don’t know each other find themselves alone in an elevator, they invariably stand as far away from each other as possible. They certainly don’t face one another, and it’s unlikely they make eye contact or speak. If the elevator is crowded, people stare…