Since we’ve just gone through the season of excess, I thought I’d do some Web sleuthing to determine alcohol’s economic impact on society. Estimates vary dramatically but a report from the reputable National Institute of Health (NIH) suggests the impact in the U.S. could be more than $100B annually. Regardless of the exact number, the…
What’s with all of the ice? The question bothered me after a recent trip to Whole Foods Market, an upscale market near my home. The container of hummus I bought hadn’t been refrigerated; it was displayed in a large barrel of ice. In fact, lots of other food and drinks items were stored in ice barrels…
If you had $100 to spend to make yourself happy, would you buy something or spend it on a memorable experience? According to a Cornell paper entitled “To do or to have: That is the question“, the things you own don’t make you as happy as the things you do. The authors provide three primary…
Catch the twist in the title? If you do a person a favor, you would expect that person to like you more. However, the research shows something different. If you do someone a favor, you tend to like that person more as a result. The reason is that we justify our actions to ourselves by…
We glorify leadership and encourage everyone to be leaders. There are hundreds of books on leadership, a plethora of expensive leadership consultants, and even a pithy saying about being the lead dog in the sled. But we can’t all be leaders. After all, then there would be no one to follow the leaders. And without…
The numerosity heuristic can ruin your diet. According to numerosity, people pay more attention to the number of units rather than the type of units which leads to faulty conclusions. Research shows we will pay more for a 7-day vacation than a one week vacation, and will complain less about a flight that is delayed for…
Have you ever made dinner reservations at multiple restaurants and then forgotten to cancel the ones that you didn’t use? While multiple reservations might be convenient for diners, no-shows cost restaurants thousands of dollars per month. The most common way to reduce these losses is to take customers’ credit card information at the time of…
For the last 10 years, U.S. News & World Report has published an annual ranking of the top American hospitals in 16 specialties and 20+ metro areas. In the 2010 survey, only 152 of the 4,852 hospitals evaluated performed well enough to rank in any specialty. Of those 152, fourteen of them were given ‘honor role’…
While popular wisdom is that any publicity is good publicity, academic research has largely shown negative word of mouth hurts company brand and sales. For example, negative movie reviews decrease box office receipts to the point that Hollywood pundits believe that it is “almost impossible to recover from bad buzz.” As a specific example, Viacom Chairman…
After a week during which I spent a lot of time discussing organizational design, I thought it might be amusing to update a classic comic which describes how different parts of an organization interpret customer needs. Like all humor based on stereotypes, it doesn’t reflect reality but we can’t help but cringe at a small…