Blog: "Someone Should Have Taught Me This..."
Essential guides, techniques, and psychology principles for building a kick-ass marketing operation
The Anti-motivational Speech – A Top 10 List
When I was 11 years old, I saw a speech by 80's-era motivational speaker Joe Charbonneau. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and from that day forward wanted to be a public speaker of some kind. That star faded a little bit as I got older, and I could peek...
My Strongest Habit Is Falling Out Of Them
"A change in bad habits leads to a change in life." -- Jenny Craig "My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income." -- Errol Flynn I'm writing this as I puff and wheeze a little. I'm trying to get back into the habit of going to the gym, a place...
A Belated Thank You For a Great Mention
I want to say a very sincere and very belated thank you to Jared Blake DiCroce of the blog JaredBlakeDiCroce: Chicken soup for the deranged and enlightened mind. Back in January, Jared named this blog as one of his "7 & 7 Awards." The 7 & 7 award is a...
This Time Is Different
I would like to bring your attention to an excellent book: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. It's written by two econometricians: Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland, and her research partner at Harvard, Kenneth Rogoff. Anyone who...
The Sensitivity Gene
"It's got nothing to do with environment. With his genes, you could put him anywhere and he'd come out on top. Breeding, same as in race horses. It's in the blood." --Mortimer Duke, Trading Places For years, scientists have been trying to trace the genetic...
Michael J. Muldoon, Teacher and Coach, 1948-2012
Anyone can talk a good game about emotional intelligence. But when they pass away, and the line for their wake goes out the door and around the building, it's a sign that they knew a little something about the subject. Mike Muldoon was a marketer, corporate leadership...
Group Collaboration and Creativity
A popular new book called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking challenges conventional notions of group collaboration and brainstorming. Author Susan Cain contends that group work, while essential in context, has "overtaken workplaces,...
What are ‘Shadow Beliefs’?
A while back, an MBA instructor of mine asked me to find some information for him on a term he'd read about (I think it was in Kevin Cashman's Leadership from the Inside Out). The term was "Shadow Belief," and he wanted to talk about the concept in one of his...
Why Corporations Undervalue Your Contribution
Capital managers have always viewed companies as collections of assets rather than employees, but over the last 30 years, this mentality has become an unfortunate, unquestioned part of our mainstream culture. The viewpoint didn't really become real for me until I took...
The Sine Qua Non of Theatre, and the Two Hours I Want Back
During the last half hour of The Goodman's Camino Real, while I was trying to paper-cut my wrists open with the edges of my program, I was asking myself, "How much of what we consider theatre can you strip away before you can no longer call it theatre?" Camino Real is...
Emotional Energy is More Real Thank You Might Think
It turns out that when you're feeling emotionally or mentally "drained," you're more right on with your wording than you know. You are actually losing real energy, in the form of blood glucose stored (in finite quantities) in the brain. Now, cutting-edge research...
Do Republicans and Democrats Actually Think Differently?
Michael Dodd, a professor at the University of Nebraska, wanted to find out if people who consider themselves left-leaning have physiological differences from those who are right-leaning. In his two recent studies, which were covered by The Economist, he tested 46...
From Study Hacks: Making Sense of a Recent Attack on Practice
This is from Study Hacks, a blog that's so popular, chances are you've already read the article. I'm a huge enthusiast in the whole talent vs effort debate, and so this was immediately interesting to me: Is Talent Underrated? Making Sense of a Recent Attack on...
How Debt Screws With Our Heads, Part 2: Distortion and Bias
This is Part 2 of a 2-part article on the human cognition of risk and debt. Part 1 can be found here. In our last post, we talked about the loss-aversion mechanisms of the brain, and how they send us emotional signals that help us avoid unwise risk. We also noted that...
How Debt Screws With Our Heads, Part 1: Pleasure and Pain
This is Part 1 of a 2-part article on the human cognition of risk and debt. The second part can be found here. In her textbook Neuroeconomics and the Firm, Angela A. Stanton quotes psychiatrist and former trader Richard Peterson, who tells us the story of Lee: Lee...
Swarm Intelligence: Is the Group Really Smarter?
Swarm Intelligence, or Swarm Theory, is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organizing systems: ants in a colony, movie raters at Rotten Tomatoes, participants in a market economy, etc. By observing these systems in nature, scientists have theorized that...
Where Genius Comes From
"Edwin Land once told me that those people who can stand at the intersection of the humanities and science...are the people who can change the world." --Walter Isaacson quoting Steve Jobs "I am here to stop your heart…. I am here to make you think…. I am not here to...
A Message to Data Analysts, Our Future Overlords
[Editor's Note] This entry is written as part of the Analytics Blogarama hosted by SmartData Collective. The subject prompt was: "The Emerging Role of the Analyst." *** As the post-apocalyptic civilization of 2017 (yes, it's not too far off) sifts through banks of...
Rational Markets and Irrational Traders
"Traders and rodents...seem to have something in common." --The Economist If you're in the current cool-crowd of psychology, you are probably a cognitive psychologist. Interest in, and funding for, cognitive psychology has greatly increased over the last fifteen to...
Do Nice Guys Really Finish Last? Notre Dame Study Says…
In 2011, 480 business management undergrads at Notre Dame participated in a study in which they were to play the role of HR managers. They were assigned randomly to examine either eight male or eight female entry-level candidate descriptions and determine which of the...