When someone handed you a calculator for the first time, it meant that long division was never going to be required of you ever again. A huge savings in time, a decrease in the cognitive load of decision making. Now... | Continue reading
Is the glass half full or half empty? The pessimist sees what's present today and can only imagine eventual decline. The glass is already half empty and it's only going to get worse. The optimist understands that there's a difference... | Continue reading
Avoiding a problem with foresight and good design is a cheap, highly leveraged way to do your work. Extinguishing a problem before it gets expensive and difficult is almost as good, and far better than paying a premium when there's... | Continue reading
There are a billion people trying to do something important for the first time. These people are connected by the net, posting, creating, daring to leap first. It's hard, because the number of people racing with you to be original... | Continue reading
As your new idea spreads, most people who hear about it will dislike it. (click to enlarge) Start at the left. Your new idea, your proposal to the company, your new venture, your innovation—no one knows about it. As you... | Continue reading
It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking you need to be prettier if you want to be an actor or actress. It turns out, though, that most important thespians aren't conventionally pretty (Marlon Brando, Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie,... | Continue reading
Coming and going matter far more than what happens in the middle. Opening things. Closing them. Tearing off the bandage. Losing something. Meeting someone new. Getting on the airplane, getting off of it. Being greeted. Elections. Ending a feud. We... | Continue reading
Challenge one: Believing that the solution you've got (the person you want to hire, the strategy you want to implement, the decision you want to make) is the one and only way to make the problem go away or take... | Continue reading
A neighbor recently put in some new sidewalk. As usual, the workman interrupted the unbroken swath of perfect concrete with lines every three feet. What are the lines for? Well, the ground shifts. When it does, perfect concrete cracks in... | Continue reading
Human beings suffer from scope insensitivity. Time and again, we're unable to put more urgency or more value on choices that have more impact. We don't donate ten times as much to a charity that's serving 10 times (or even... | Continue reading
But they're useful. That's why professionals use them to teach, to learn and to understand. A metaphor takes what we know and uses it as a lever to understand something else. And the only way we can do that is... | Continue reading
Pop culture is enamored with the Bond villian, the psycho, the truly evil character intent on destruction. It lets us off the hook, because it makes it easy to see that bad guys are other people. But most of the... | Continue reading
A few rhetorical questions: Is a physical therapist with a professional logo better than one with a handmade sign? Are you more likely to stay at a hotel that you've heard of as opposed to an unknown one, even if... | Continue reading
It's about scale. Pick a long enough one (or a short enough one) and you can see the edges. In the short run, there's never enough time. In the long run, constrained resources become available. In the short run, you... | Continue reading
Before we start laying out the logical argument for a course of action, it's worth considering whether a logical argument is what's needed. It may be that the person you're engaging with cares more about symbols, about tribal identity, about... | Continue reading
The web was built on words. And words, of course, are available to anyone who can type. They're cheap, easy to edit and incredibly powerful when used well. Today's internet, though, is built on video. Much more difficult to create... | Continue reading
They got us hooked on data. Advertisers want more data. Direct marketers want more data. Who saw it? Who clicked? What percentage? What's trending? What's yielding? But there's one group that doesn't need more data... Anyone who's making a long-term... | Continue reading
Trust is the biggest hurdle. And trust largely comes from social proof. Is everyone doing this? Is it safe? Will I be embarrassed/ridiculed/left out/left behind/feel stupid? Social proof shares a word with social networks, but they're only loosely related. Social... | Continue reading
Roller coasters work because of momentum—the quantity of motion from the downhill allows the car to make it up the next rise. Without momentum, the car would merely stop. But few things in the world of ideas follow the same... | Continue reading
Most people don't get too upset at anything a two-year-old kid says to them. That's because we don't believe that toddlers have a particularly good grasp on the nuances of the world, nor do they possess much in the way... | Continue reading
Commonly misunderstood and misspelled as "striking a cord." A cord is a single strand that connects. You can strike a cord, but not much happens. A chord, on the other hand, is the resonance of multiple cords, more than one... | Continue reading
... is now two problems. | Continue reading
It's great to dream like a kid, but no fun to be treated like one. It bristles because we feel that, even if the person involved has best intentions, we've outgrown being treated like a child. Some behaviors to consider... | Continue reading
Doing things with rigor takes effort, but not everything you put effort into is done with rigor. Rigor is a focus on process. Paying attention to not just how you do things, but why. Rigor requires us to never use... | Continue reading
Many people are trying to find their calling. But that doesn't explain Marianne Money, bank manager, or Jim Kardwell, who owns a card company. Or Thomas Duck who started Ugly Duckling rent-a-car and Tito Beveridge who makes vodka. It doesn't... | Continue reading
When we were kids, my mom, fully exasperated, would survive a day when school was closed by dropping a bunch of us off at Sheridan Lanes for a few hours of bowling. You only had a certain amount of money... | Continue reading
You'll never hear it spoken aloud, but it happens all the time, particularly when you're selling something new, something powerful, something that causes a positive change: "You're right, but we're not ready." This is what people felt about the internet,... | Continue reading
One of the little-remembered innovations of the industrial economy was the price tag. If it was for sale, you knew how much it cost. And if you got a job, you knew what you got paid--by the piece, at first,... | Continue reading
Perhaps you can't see it, but we can. That 2 x 4, the board set right across that doorway, about 5 feet off the ground. You're running it at it full speed, and in a moment, you're going to slam... | Continue reading
More than 10,000 people attended the Lincoln Douglas debates, and yet they debated without amplification. It's only quite recently that we began to disassociate talking-to-many from talking loudly. Having a large and varied audience used to mean yelling, it used... | Continue reading
A restaurant that's too small for its following creates pent-up demand and can thrive as it lays plans to expand. A restaurant that's too big merely fails. There are occasional counterexamples of ventures that fail because they were too small... | Continue reading
Your money: Almost no one knows how to think about money and investing. Squadrons of people will try to confuse you and rip you off. Many will bore you. But Andrew Tobias has written a book that might just change... | Continue reading
Sooner or later, tribes begin to exclude interested but unaffiliated newcomers. It happens to religious sects, to surfers and to online communities as well. Nascent groups with open arms become mature groups too set in their ways to evangelize and... | Continue reading
"I bought the diet book, but ate my usual foods." "I filled the prescription, but didn't take the meds." "I took the course... well, I watched the videos... but I didn't do the exercises in writing." Merely looking at something... | Continue reading
It's often about asking, not about what's needed. Years ago, when I lived in California, I'd go to the grocery store nearly every day. I usually paid by check. Each time, the clerk would ask me for my phone number... | Continue reading
When we run a new session of the altMBA, we ask each student to write a short bio and submit a picture. A week later, we share the nicely laid out PDF with the extraordinary class that has been assembled... | Continue reading
Yes, it can lead to wholesale destruction, but it's the incessant (but much smaller) daily tidal force that moves all boats, worldwide. And far more powerful than either is the incredible impact of seepage, of moisture, of the liquid that... | Continue reading
In the common vernacular, a power move is something that gets done to you. The person with power demands an accommodation, or switches the venue, or has an admin call you instead of calling you himself. Someone with a resource... | Continue reading
Just because you have a supply (a skill, an inventory, a location) that doesn't necessarily mean you are entitled to demand. The market decides what it wants. You can do your best to influence that choice, but it's never (alas)... | Continue reading
A problem is open to a solution. That what makes it a problem. A paradox, on the other hand, is gated by boundaries that make a solution impossible. If you've been working on a situation, chewing on it, throwing everything... | Continue reading
This is one of the most important untaught skills available to each of us. Three times in a row, a salesperson is rejected by one prospect after another. A customer complains to a company that its website is not working... | Continue reading
What you measure usually gets paid attention to, and what you pay attention to, usually gets better. Numbers supercharge measurement, because numbers are easy to compare. Numbers make it difficult to hide. And hence the problem. Income is easy to... | Continue reading
Not voting leads to an outcome as much as voting does. You're still responsible, even if you didn't actively participate. In any situation, not stating your opinion allows things to move forward. Silence is not nothing, it is still an... | Continue reading
Risk and the appearance of risk aren't the same thing. In fact, for most of us, they rarely overlap. Realizing that there's a difference is the first step in making better decisions. | Continue reading
Marketing outreach (ads, PR, sponsorships, etc.) is not about one thing. It's about three things. Awareness is a simple ping: Oh, she's running for President. Oh, they just opened one in our neighborhood. Oh, they're having a sale. Trust is... | Continue reading
You are not a brand. You're a person. A living, breathing, autonomous individual who doesn't seek to maximize ROI or long-term brand value. You have choices. You have the ability to change your mind. You can tell the truth, see... | Continue reading
It's a bug in our operating system, and one that's amplified by the media. I'm listening to a speech from ten years ago, twenty years ago, forty years ago... "During these tough times... these tenuous times... these uncertain times..." And... | Continue reading
Most people can't resist a mirror. It makes the wait for an elevator more palatable, and we can't help checking--how do I look? In many ways, though, this is futile, because we can never know how we look through other... | Continue reading