Fun video by Barry Swartz author of “The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less”. Why choice makes people miserable: regret over the choice not taken, and fear of that future regret, the cost of managing a portfolio of options, the benchmark for success is raised higher, i.e. expectations escalate self blame, when the [...]
From “The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads” (pdf). Pictorial Analogy Replacement Extreme analogy Extreme Situation Absurd alternatives Extreme Attribute Extreme Worth Consequences Extreme consequences Inverted consequences Competition Attribute in competitition Worth in competition Uncommon Use Interactive Experiment Activation Imaginary Experiment Dimensionality New Parameter Connection Multiplication Division Time Leap
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
As requests go “How long will it take?” is one of the tough ones. Taleb’s book Black Swan makes an thought provoking point about it. Like most of that book the underlying question is what statistical distribution the data is drawn. Naturally, that should color our expectations. Some project durations are reasonable, Gaussian. How long [...]
Saturday, February 2, 2008
A short but interesting posting that helped liberate an idea for me. Globalization’s fans claim the market for much of their ethical underpinnings. The market is good; globalization is an example of the spreading reach of markets, hence it’s a wonderful thing. But, but. It seems to me that it’s just not that simple. It [...]
Saturday, January 5, 2008
I like threes and I’m currently quite interested in how we manage (pilot?) our attention. How we make our choices. how we decide what to do. So I liked the intro to Kahneman and Lovallo’s 1993 paper on how “decision makers” go about their work. The paper is introducing a behavioral model for that, [...]
Here’s a nice sentence template: “This mechanism is called Z and Z is a pivotal driver of Y. See W for an approachable introduction to the theory of Z. But be forewarned that there is a lot of artistic praxis involved as well.” I’ve always liked the word praxis, or “practice or exercise of a [...]
Friday, September 21, 2007
Consider this quote: “about 320,000 foreclosures – or repossessions – were begun in each of the first two quarters of 2007 he said, against an average of 225,000 per quarter in the past six years.” What are we to make of that? Some easy calculations: thats up 92 thousand per quarter or 42%; or from [...]
One of life’s puzzles is how to elicit desired behaviors. Managers, parents, leaders, what have you try out various schemes to address this puzzle. I sometimes characterise this as thrashing about looking for the right lever to pull. It’s not uncommon to see people deeply committed to a particular lever; metric management for example. The [...]
At the bank this morning they patiently explained their inability to do a particular thing what wanted doing because of “security.” I had a flash back to an analogous experience at a bank in the early 1970s. Thought at that time the explanation was “our insurance company won’t let us do that.” Both then and [...]
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
DAIC, which sounds like Daisy, is one of those BSchool/Psychology-Today frameworks I picked up at some point in my work life. It’s mnemonic for four roles that employee’s might play in the process of reaching a decision: Driver Approver Informed Consultant Since entrepreneurs ran the organization inside of which I learned this particular framework they [...]
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