Blog: "Someone Should Have Taught Me This..."
Essential guides, techniques, and psychology principles for building a kick-ass marketing operationThe “Superstar” Trap
In the wake of President Obama's election, it's easy to forget that in 2007, no one questioned that Hillary Clinton would become the next president. It's difficult nowadays to remember exactly how far removed she was from all other Democratic contenders. In addition...
The “Shaken Self”: Self-Confidence and Product Choice
I'm always excited when science finally catches up with marketing. A man walks into a sociologist's office, and is asked to write a short essay highlighting his healthy life habits. He does so. Afterwards, he's offered a choice of two small rewards for his work: an...
Interesting Insights from the Sleep Doctor
Earlier this year, I'd been having trouble sleeping. Especially so on class nights, when I'd get home late and still feel energized and wound up. A friend of mine gave me a sleep CD (thank you for that, by the way) which, after several weeks of procrastination and...
How Pressure and Stress Are Affecting Your Performance
Some years ago, a Princeton psychologist named Sam Glucksberg brought a group of test subjects into a room. In the room was a table positioned against a wall. On the table was a book of matches, a box of thumbtacks, and a candle. "Your job," Glucksberg told his...
What do we do with the negative feedback?
"Do what you're good at." "Do what you love." "Do what you would do for free." Is there anybody reading this who found this kind of career advice as utterly useless as I did? For a variety of reasons, some of us don't have the first clue what this goal might be. I...
Are We Really Missing The Point on Charlie Sheen?
"The midlife crisis is the moment in a man’s life when he realizes he can’t (or won’t) any longer maintain the pose that he thought was required of him." --Bret Easton Ellis Charlie Sheen: American Meltdown We've all been watching a drug-induced breakdown, but is that...
Jon Stewart, Gen-Y, and Brand-centrism
In my most recent MBA class on leadership, we covered generational differences. We learned that there are certain workplace-related traits that can be ascribed to Baby Boomers, for example, that is not a part of the Gen-X or Gen-Y experience. As a leader, one may...
Rethinking the 6 Human Needs
In this article, I propose a new way of thinking about the 6 core human needs, reinventing what we learned from Maslow’s Hierarchy.
All Positive Thinking is Not Equal
Do yourself a favor really quickly: go and bookmark a blog called Psyblog. Go ahead, I'll wait. Here also is their RSS Link for your reader. Psyblog is a British blog on psychology and motivation written by Jeremy Dean, a researcher at University College London. He...
What Does It Actually Mean To Be “In Your Head”
What does it actually mean to be “in your head”? Can high performers actually perform worse by buckling down too hard? It turns out that they can.
What Is “Tough”?
"Toughness" is an adjective that gets thrown around a great deal, particularly in politics. Many public figures go out of their way to associate themselves with "tough," "independent" stances and hard-line foreign policy, and each successive generation paints...
9 Strategies for Influencing Others
The Hay Group is a management consulting firm that does its own research into motivation strategies and produces self-assessment materials for students and clients. I recently took one of their assessments for an MBA class on leadership strategies. The assessment was...
Motivation in the Workplace: Surprising New Science
Daniel Pink is the author of a phenomenal business book called Drive, The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He has given several talks about his conclusions, including one at TED, and another at the RSA. The RSA talk has been re-edited into this very cool...
My Opponent is Hitler – Why Negative Ads Work
"I am a Christian war hero charity donor who will create jobs, lower taxes, increase Medicare and make the sun shine every day. My opponent dresses in women's clothes to perform Satan-worshiping ceremonies, when he's not luring small children into his unmarked van."...
Demanding High Status at the Top of a Presentation
I hear a common complaint about internal company presentations. Internal presentations are apt to be less formal, and therefore audience members commonly to interrupt with questions, tangents, challenges and typing out emails on their Blackberries. Most times its the...
How To Use Body Rhythms to Captivate People
This comes from a book that my friend clued me into, called Winning Body Language, by Mark Bowden. One of his chapters talks about using body language to take advantage of the way our minds deal with predictability and interruption. Pattern interruption is a...
Five Behaviors That Communicate High or Low Status
We Are All Just Squabbling Ducks Previously, I have remarked on an area of interpersonal dynamics called the Status Transaction. This concept comes from one of the fathers of improv theatre. It says that humans, just like other pack animals, communicate in subtle...
Shakespeare, Without Wailing or Gesticulating
Last week, I saw the Chicago Shakespeare Company's newest staging of Romeo and Juliet. It reminded me that It's been about ten years or so since I saw a staging of R&J featuring actual chemistry between the two leads. I'm still on the lookout for it. Shakespeare,...
The Biggest Pitfall in Work Presentations, and How To Avoid It
It's been a little while since I last posted an entry. I'm coming to the end of a double-loaded term in MBA school, and that's where most of my time has been going recently. Also, I think I've been putting too much effort into writing seminal entries: 1,200- to...
The Secret Triggers Behind The American Identity
The Tea Party makes a nice, visceral example of American moral and political outcry, but my questions are broader than that. Is there some subtle nerve being hit here, that runs deeper than the obvious surface issues? Some secret anxiety that runs through the core American identity, of which this is just one example?