Monday, 23 September 2013
All Risks Are Not Created Equal: Mapping Your “Risk Profile”
How adventurous are you? Very? Not so much? We tend to think of people as fitting squarely into one category or another: Those who like to take risks, and those who don’t. But, according to Stanford professor and neuroscientist Tina Seelig, the distinction is actually much more subtle. Or as she puts it: “Risk-taking is not binary.”
Here’s what Seelig had to say about risk-taking in an interview for our new 99U book:
You’re likely comfortable taking some types of risks while finding other types uncomfortable. You might not even see the risks that are comfortable for you to take, discounting their riskiness, while you are likely to amplify the risk of things that make you anxious.
For example, you might love flying down a ski slope at lightning speed or jumping out of airplanes, and not even view these activities as risky. Or you might love giving public lectures or taking on daunting intellectual challenges. The first group is drawn to physical risks, the second to social risks, and the third to intellectual risks.
There are five primary types of risks: physical, social, emotional, financial, and intellectual. I often ask people to map their own risk profile. With only a little bit of reflection, each person knows which types of risks he or she is willing to take. They realize pretty quickly that risk-taking isn’t uniform.
You can dig into our full conversation on failure and risk-taking in Maximize Your Potential , the latest 99U book, featuring essays from Tina Seelig, Joshua Foer, Cal Newport, and many more.
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Sunday, 22 September 2013
Saturday, 21 September 2013
Friday, 20 September 2013
Thursday, 19 September 2013
The Art of Letter Writing Is Dead (And Other Concerns)
A reminder from webcomic xkcd, people have always feared that technology is “ruining” things. We can lament the “pace of change” or we can develop the skills to manage it, whether it’s the telegraph or Twitter.
Read the entire comic, which features excerpts of people complaining about the “pace of modern life” for the past 150 years.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/eyCI_y9fWZY/the-art-of-letter-writing-is-dead-and-other-concerns
Wednesday, 18 September 2013
Tuesday, 17 September 2013
Monday, 16 September 2013
Sunday, 15 September 2013
Friday, 13 September 2013
Why Keep A Diary?
Progress is the single most important motivating factor when it comes to work. That might seem obvious. But what’s not obvious is that we don’t always see our progress. In fact, we’re prone to lose track of it, if we don’t regularly document what’s happening in our lives.
Harvard professor Teresa Amabile has been researching what motivates creatives, and what keeps them going, for years. And it turns out the simple answer is: Keeping a diary.
Here’s what Amabile has to say about the power of diaries in an essay penned with Steven Kramer and Ela Ben-Ur for our new 99U book, Maximize Your Potential :
Creative people frequently work solo, without the benefit of colleagues who could help capture or develop their ideas. But even teams and organizations rarely offer creatives the necessary time, understanding, and patience to nurture their creative seedlings. A diary can help fill the void. It can serve as a sounding board and an alter-ego companion—one who will never forget what you say. What might otherwise have been isolated or passing thoughts become permanent and potentially powerful ideas.
This sounding board can serve a number of functions, the simplest of which is planning. Many entries in “The Daybooks” of Edward Weston reveal him focusing on future actions to capitalize on emerging opportunities:
“The excerpts from my daybook and photographs will be published in the August issue of Creative Art… It seems my fortunes are to change for something better. Now I must spend all my spare time in cutting and correcting my manuscript.” —Edward Weston, May 23, 1928
Of course, Weston could have used a simple calendar or to-do list to plan next steps. But notice his remark that his luck seems to be changing. What a calendar cannot do, and a journal can, is help you reflect on the big picture of your life and your creative work—where it is, what it means, and what direction you want it to take.
Diaries can be particularly helpful tools for accurately capturing positive events. In his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” the psychologist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between experience and memory, noting that human memory of an experience can easily be altered. Kahneman describes a man who was enjoying a concert immensely until the very end, when there was an obnoxious sound in the concert hall. The man said that the noise ruined the entire concert for him. But it didn’t really, of course; he had enjoyed the concert up until that moment. What it did ruin was his memory of the concert.
By keeping a daily diary, you will reduce the chance that some later event will transform your memory of the day’s experiences. So when you feel you have accomplished something, write it down soon, before a client or critic has the opportunity to say something that diminishes that sense of progress.
You can find the complete essay, as well as contributions from Joshua Foer, Jonathan Fields, and Tony Schwartz and more, in Maximize Your Potential , the latest addition to our 99U book series.
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Thursday, 12 September 2013
The Anti-Hiring Pitch
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Wednesday, 11 September 2013
Tuesday, 10 September 2013
Monday, 9 September 2013
Marissa Mayer: Play With The Varisty Squad
Business Insider takes a detailed look into the working life of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. One choice excerpt:
When people ask Mayer why she joined Google after getting her masters in symbolic systems at Stanford, she likes to tell them her “Laura Beckman story.” It’s about the daughter of her middle school piano teacher, Joanne Beckman.
Mayer begins: “Laura tried out for the volleyball team her junior year at high school. At the end of the tryouts, she was given a hard choice: bench on varsity, or start on JV.
“Most people, when they’re faced with this choice, would choose to play – and they’ll pick JV. Laura did the opposite. She chose varsity, and she benched the whole season.
“But then an amazing thing happened. Senior year she tried out and she made varsity as a starter, and all the JV starters from the previous year benched their whole senior year.
“I remember asking her: ‘How did you know to choose varsity?’
“And she said, ‘I just knew that if I got to practice with the better players every day, I would become a much better player, even if I didn’t get to play in any of the games.’”
The moral of Mayer’s story is that it’s always better to surround yourself with the best people so that they will challenge you and you will grow.
“My quest to find, and be surrounded by, smart people is what brought me to Google,” she says.
…
“The turning point for me,” she says, “was realizing that I would learn more at Google, trying to build a company, regardless of whether we failed or succeeded, than I would at any of the other companies I had offers from.”
Read the entire biography here.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/PCQk2-jd6-0/marissa-mayer-play-with-the-varisty-squad
Sunday, 8 September 2013
Saturday, 7 September 2013
Friday, 6 September 2013
Thursday, 5 September 2013
Are You Standing in Your Own Way?
When we’re the new person working on a project, it’s natural for us to seek the approval of our colleagues, who have been there longer than us. While there is certainly a time for observing, eventually it’s time for you to make your mark. After all, that’s why you were brought in, right? It’s important to learn to trust yourself, and to know that those around you trust you as well. The Harvard Business Review writes about one worker’s epiphany that helped her trust herself:
But when she pressed [her boss] for more specifics, [he] simply said, “I trust you to continue doing what you do so well, and I expect you’ll ask for my help if you need it.”In that moment, she realized something profound: He was telling her that she was free. She was in charge of her own considerable domain — and her own life. Somehow, amid the pressures to meet operational goals and balance budgets, she had failed to notice the full implications of that shift.
She wanted to make sure she understood correctly. “You mean to say that I can push the envelope as far as I want, as long as I believe it is in the best interest of the company, and you’ll tell me when I’ve gone too far?”
He nodded his agreement. She was buoyed by the possibilities that her newfound freedom presented, and at the same time, she felt the weight of the responsibility this change implied. Before she even made it to the door, Karen started thinking about how she could take ownership — and advantage — of this situation.
Previously: Are You (Subconsciously) Afraid of Success?
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Wednesday, 4 September 2013
Announcing the 99U Pop-Up School Class of 2013
The call to action was simple: we wanted to round up the best and brightest young entrepreneurs for our first ever 99U Pop-Up School. The “Class of 2103″ is an eclectic group of makers, coders, artists and more, all with a passion for getting things done. Winners received a free three-day pass to the Pop-Up School, an opportunity to lead a Round Table Talk at the event, and access to a private cocktail event at Samsung Accelerator.
Along with our friends at Samsung Accelerator, we’re happy to present the winners:
Anselm Bradford
Fellow, Code for America
www.anselmbradford.com
Alison Bryce
Project Manager, No Noisy
www.nonoisy.com
John Coghlan
Co-Founder, DUMBO Startup Lab
www.dumbostartuplab.com
Natty Coleman
Designer, Freelance
www.nattycoleman.com
Dean Cooney
Intern, Wildcard
www.trywildcard.com
Ian Gadson
Designer, Freelancer
www.iangadson.com
Navit Keren
UX Designer, Huge
www.navitk.com
Konstantinos Kollias
Communication Design Consultant, Freelance
www.startupmail.com
Meghan Lazier
Entrepreneur & Communications Strategist
www.meglaz.com
Joe Loveless
Chief Ideator, Digital Nomad
www.joeloveless.com
David Mahoney
Designer, Freelance
www.idmahoney.com
Polina Marchenko
CEO ,KptnCook GbR
www.kptncook.com
Khary Kwabena Menelik
Mobile Developer, Independent
www.be.net/custommobiledesign
Elan Miller
Co-founder, Glimpse
www.itsglimpse.com
Fares Nimri
Leader, Talentscout
www.faresnimri.com
Ehsan Noursalehi
VP & Designer, Bump Nonprofit Design Studio
www.madebybump.org
Sean O’Connor
Ruckus Maker
www.brightful.ly
Brijesh Patel
CTO & COO, InquisitHealth
www.inquisithealth.com
Betty Quinn
MFA Student, Parsons
www.bettyquinn.com
John Smith
Student, Berklee College of Music
www.Slide20xl.com
Joe Speicher
Founder, Ground to Grounds
www.groundtogrounds.com
Jake Szymanski
Strategist, Instrument
www.weareinstrument.com
Shahrouz Varshabi
Developer/Designer, No Noisy
www.nonoisy.com
Pei Zhan
Founder, Dezign Lab
www.dezignlab.co
A big thank you to everyone who applied!
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/wBPGkLQnqOI/announcing-the-99u-pop-up-school-class-of-2013
Tuesday, 3 September 2013
Charles Bukowski: Don’t Waste Your Life
Author Charles Bukowski in a letter to a friend about finally “breaking free” of his job and being able to write:
And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.
…
So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.
To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
via Letter of Note
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Sunday, 1 September 2013
Saturday, 31 August 2013
Friday, 30 August 2013
Thursday, 29 August 2013
Wednesday, 28 August 2013
Tuesday, 27 August 2013
Monday, 26 August 2013
The Research Trap
Jack Zerby, entrepreneur and former designer at Pentagram on “The Research Trap:”
I’ve read over and over the importance of validating ideas, but it seems I was blurring the lines between market validation and personal validation. I wasn’t looking for them to say “yes I would definitely pay for that.” I was looking for “Jack you are awesome, please grace us with more of your infinite wisdom.”
In a sense I was looking for them to validate me, rather than my idea. I kept going because I was getting wonderful feedback about me and my idea, and who in the world would stop that ego gravy-train and actually go build something?
Read more about Zerby’s epiphany, fueled by his mother. Yes, really.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/peB_6kum47I/the-research-trap
Friday, 23 August 2013
Thursday, 22 August 2013
Wednesday, 21 August 2013
A Tour of TaskRabbit’s Offices
Whether it’s an open floor plan or more traditional set up, it’s always fascinating to see where creatives are getting work done. OPEN Forum has a peek inside of the offices of TaskRabbit, which is complete with “puzzle tables” and is full of “TaskRabbit green.”
To see the entire tour, check out the story on OPEN Forum, this month’s sponsor of Workbook.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/tw-brqzpddw/a-tour-of-taskrabbits-offices
Tuesday, 20 August 2013
What Is a Life Changing Realization That You Wish You Had Sooner?
At community Q&A site Ask Metafilter, one member asks “What is a life changing realization that you wish you’d had sooner?” The results are a compelling mix of not-so-obvious career and life advice. Some of our favorites:
- “A lot of epiphanies come at the end of an unpleasant process. That process is not only necessary to achieve the epiphany, but part of the epiphany itself. As such, distilling that process down to an axiom isn’t as valuable as going through the process itself, however grueling it might be.”
- “Put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others.”
- “HR works for management, not for you. Never go to them with a problem.”
- “Not making a decision is still a decision.”
- “The traditional road to education and success is a trap. But it is actually a road. So if you don’t take it, you’d better have some damn good alternate routes planned.”
- “It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It matters if people like you. I think this is one of the mistaken lessons a lot of kids pick up from school, that it’s all about having the right answer and if you’re the guy with the right answer, it doesn’t matter if all the kids hate you because you get As anyway. Sooooooo not the case in the working world.”
Have one to add? Let us know below.
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Monday, 19 August 2013
“I Approached Business the Way a 6-Year-Old Would.”
Fast Company has an outstanding piece on the revitalization of Detroit, and all of the do-ers that are making it happen, many with little or no experience. It’s a must read for anyone launching a project. Andy Didorosi is one of the people profiled, and he shared how he started a bus company to help fill in for Detroit’s gutted public transportation system:
I approached the business the way a 6-year-old would. What would people like on the buses? Well, people would like music. So we put good sound systems in. And the buses couldn’t stay yellow, so I paid Detroit artists to paint them. And I thought people would like to know where the buses were at any moment, so we found some free apps that allow you to see where the bus is. And finally we asked where would people like buses, and we thought, Woodward Avenue–we’ll drive buses up and down Woodward.
…
So I called the insurance company, and they’re like, ‘You want to do what?’ They said, ‘Okay, insurance is going to be $90,000 a bus.’ I was defeated. My buses cost $2,000. Why is the insurance that much?
“So I called them back. This time I tell them, ‘I want to create a private bus system that just goes from one bar to another bar. And they’re like, ‘Oh, no problem, we do that all the time.’ So then I had a bus company.
Read the entire story, you won’t read anything better today.
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Sunday, 18 August 2013
Saturday, 17 August 2013
Friday, 16 August 2013
Thursday, 15 August 2013
Wednesday, 14 August 2013
Tuesday, 13 August 2013
Monday, 12 August 2013
Sunday, 11 August 2013
Saturday, 10 August 2013
Friday, 9 August 2013
Size Does Matter: The Smaller Your Device, the Lower Your Confidence
The Harvard Business School released a study that points to the use of small gadgets as a reason that people are less likely to take initiative or willing go out of their comfort zones. The larger the gadgets used, the more assertive participants were.
When people use smaller devices, their posture contracts, increasing stress and decreasing testosterone levels, say researchers Maarten Bos and Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School. The inverse is true when people use large desktop computers, which force users to assume a more open posture. And the effect continues even after the device is put away or the user logs off.
So the next time you’ve got a presentation to give or networking to do, it might be better to leave the smartphone at home.
Read the rest of the study’s findings at the Wall Street Journal.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/iIQBLkXE_qk/size-does-matter-the-smaller-your-device-the-lower-your-confidence
Thursday, 8 August 2013
Take an “Administrative Day” So You Can Focus the Rest of the Week
Unfortunately, even though we have a new artistic challenge or a project that requires more dedication, the rest of life doesn’t stop for us. Errands don’t stop. Friends and social lives don’t stop. Physical fitness and health don’t stop.
We do have a choice, though. We don’t have to let these tasks take our awareness away from our creative output. Author and professor Cal Newport shares a trick to handle all these administrative tasks, while improving focus on work:
Choose one day a week to do nothing but accomplish small tasks. Your goal should be to finish every obligation for the week that can be accomplished in less than 20 minutes and/or does not require any serious thought. For a college student, these include:
- Laundry
- Phone calls
- Cleaning
- Getting your car washed
- Filling out applications
- Sending long or important e-mails
- Paying bills
- Writing blog posts
- Catching up on your online reading
- Handling any administrative work or planning for extracurricular clubs and related obligations
While spending an entire day on administrative tasks may seem like a waste, it ensures our ability to perform at our peaks the other six days of the week. Taking one small step back on that day means being able to use the six to make a giant leap forward.
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Wednesday, 7 August 2013
Interview Hires Like Google: Ditch the Pop Quizzes
Google recently decided to spur interview questions like brain teasers or the classic cliches (“What’s your greatest weakness?”) when a study they did of their own interviewing process yielded surprising results.
On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.
Instead, what works are structured “behavioral interviews,” where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people.
More from the story:
Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.
Continue reading the interview over at The New York Times .
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Tuesday, 6 August 2013
Monday, 5 August 2013
Video: Embrace Ambiguity In The Design Process
IDEO’s New York office with a look inside their design process, as demonstrated using a slew of homemade “special effects.”
The takeaway? Let your limitations empower you and realize that “sometimes the best way through the fog, is through the fog.”
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/yefsk3zYz4k/video-embrace-ambiguity-in-the-design-process
Sunday, 4 August 2013
Friday, 2 August 2013
It’s Not About “Productivity.” It’s About Living Purposefully.
Reading quickly will take about 50 bits per second, leaving the rest for sounds, sights, and smells of the environment around you. Everything we perceive as human beings takes up some allotment of our brain’s processing power. Having a deep conversation with a loved one, watching TV, doing mindless work, and sitting quietly and watching the world around you, all draw from the same pool of attentional resources.
If we assume your brain can process 100 bits of information a second, we can extrapolate how much information your brain can process in your entire lifetime (assuming you live to be about 80 and you sleep for eight hours a night). That number comes out to be roughly 150 billion bits of information.
That sounds like a huge number, right? However, we’re talking about the entirety of your experiences as a human being being encapsulated in one simple number. Every emotion, thought, sensation, and conversation you’ll ever have is included in that number and the way you’ve allocated those 150 billion bits of attention over the course of your life will make up the entirety of who you were and what you accomplished.
Suddenly, 150 billion doesn’t seem so big.
For some, productivity is about fiddling with new tools or shaving seconds off an ultimately meaningless task. It can be fun to read about others’ productivity hacks and try them in our own workflows. But really, thinking about productivity means coming back to those 150 billion bits that make up who you are and who you will be.
It becomes less about tips and tricks and more about making sure you’re allocating the most scarce resource in the universe, your attention, in ways that most closely align with who you are and what impact you want to have on the world. It’s about eliminating the unnecessary tasks and demands that are eating away at your 150 billion bits so you can focus on something that helps another person or creates a little more beauty in the world or solves an important problem or makes you feel like you’re on this planet to do something worthwhile.
“Being productive” isn’t about getting more work done. It’s about making sure those 150 billion bits are spent as wisely as possible.
Watching TV and having a conversation with a loved one will take about the same number of bits of information for your brain to process. Mindlessly flipping through the channels after work and brainstorming a new creative endeavor take about the same number of bits to perform. Which is more meaningful to you? Which will you be glad you did more of when bit number 1,499,999,999 rolls over?
A thank you must be given to my professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for first sharing this perspective regarding attention and it’s impact on who we are and ultimately, who we end up being.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/ZzkkCii0JVI/its-not-about-productivity-its-about-living-purposefully
Thursday, 1 August 2013
Wednesday, 31 July 2013
Placing a Time Limit on Decision-Making Yields Higher Quality Choices
The next time you, or your team, have a big decision to make, Inc suggests using a timer to limit the endless discussion:
“Here’s a messy little truth about most decision-making processes: if you place a firm time limit on discussion and everyone knows there’ll be a vote at a specific time, you’ll get better-quality decisions than if you just let your team run out the clock with endless debate and try to push through an agreement at the end of the meeting when everyone is tired and irritable.”
Read more tips about decision-making here.
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You Are Bad At Assessing People (But So Is Everybody Else)
In 1920, the psychologist Edward L. Thorndike published a study showing that employees, soldiers, teachers, and aviators all seemed oddly similar across a variety of seemingly unrelated attributes on performance reviews. For example, highly reliable workers were also rated as being highly intelligent. Unkempt soldiers were rated as being physically weak. Enthusiastic teachers were also prompt, and prompt teachers showed integrity.
Thorndike was skeptical, especially of the ratings of pilots who were routinely evaluated very highly in just about every category. The pilots were thus recommended for leadership roles despite being young and lacking in the sort of training a military leadership position requires. Thorndike realized that flying aces were great at doing something that was impressive, and it provided them with something he called a “halo of general merit.” The halo influenced commanders’ assessments and raised the ratings of all their other traits, including those that got them jobs they were not qualified to hold. He called it the halo effect.
When contemplating something complex, your evaluation of one highly salient trait creates an invisible halo that taints how you perceive other unrelated and less-salient traits. For example, when scientists told subjects a photo attached to an essay was of the author (it wasn’t), subjects who saw attractive people in the photographs rated it as being better written than did people who saw a less attractive person in a photo attached to the same essay.
This is possibly why taller people make more money. One 2004 study showed that for every extra inch of height above normal a person earns on-average an extra $789 a year. This is also why candidates for president eat corndogs at state fairs. It makes them seem nice and approachable. A halo of niceness and approachability makes a person seem trustworthy enough to have access to nuclear launch codes
The effect is not always positive. Researchers once asked two groups of students to watch two different interviews of the same professor who spoke with a Belgian accent (think Jean-Claude Van Damme). In one video, the professor pretended to be laid-back and aloof. In the other, he pretended to be mean and strict. About half of the students who believed the professor was easygoing also said his accent was endearing, yet among the group who believed he was a hard-ass about 80 percent said his accent was grating. Objectively, of course, the accent was neither good or bad, but the halo made it so.
If you find yourself rating a person, product, or company positively or negatively across the board on every characteristic and attribute, know that you are likely experiencing the halo effect. The important thing to remember about this phenomenon is that you can’t avoid its influence, but you can learn to recognize when you are under its spell and how to avoid its enchantment.
- Notice when a single positive trait or credential makes a person seem desirable for a role in which that trait or credential would not improve your project. Individual attributes like attractiveness, height, recent successes, impressive former employers, and respected alma maters will skew your judgment, especially during first impressions. Make a list of what is not important and have a third party delete that information about a potential new hire, collaboration, or partnership before it reaches you.
- Periodically destroy old halos. A powerful first impression, positive or negative, creates a halo that can survive for years. Look for consistency instead. Toss out your first impressions and periodically assess everything important as if it’s the first time you’ve judged it.
—
How about you?
Have impressive credentials or other traits caused you to make hiring or partnership decisions you later regretted because of the halo effect?
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Tuesday, 30 July 2013
Turn Off Your AC: When the Temperature is Low, You Will Be Too.
Cornell University researchers found a direct link between colder room temperatures and a drop in trust, productivity, and even whether you’re more likely to be feeling lonely or not.
When temperatures were low (68 degrees, to be precise), employees committed 44% more errors and were less than half as productive as when temperatures were warm (a cozy 77 degrees).
Cold employees weren’t just uncomfortable, they were distracted. The drop in performance was costing employers 10% more per hour, per employee. Which makes sense. When our body’s temperature drops, we expend energy keeping ourselves warm, making less energy available for concentration, inspiration, and insight.
Read the rest of the study here.
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What Are Your Go-To Apps and Web Services?
We know about Gmail. We know about Evernote. But what are some of the lesser-appreciated tools you use on a daily basis?
They can be mobile apps, software, websites, or anything you use to keep your ideas moving forward. Let us know in the comments or drop us a line at @99U.
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Monday, 29 July 2013
Sunday, 28 July 2013
Saturday, 27 July 2013
Friday, 26 July 2013
Thursday, 25 July 2013
Wednesday, 24 July 2013
How Good Writers End Up Writing About Cats
The New York Times Magazine has a piece on one man’s competitiveness with his father that has some appropriate advice for budding creatives. Mainly: competitiveness is a virtue, but only in moderation. With online media it’s easy to “keep score” with pageviews, likes, and retweets, but if you use them as your only source of validation, you’re in trouble. From the piece:
Yet now writerly success has been publicly quantified in a way that allows direct daily competition — Facebook likes, retweets, page views, page read-throughs, position on the most-e-mailed list. It’s impossible to turn away from the numbers, even though they are so obviously a path to idiocy: care too much about them, and you’ll wake up one day to find yourself writing “27 cats who look like members of the royal family.” Competitiveness leads to an unhealthful narrowing of vision, at least for me. What could be more toxic to the business of writing than that brand of narrowing?
It’s case for seeking internal motivation and for doing work that you’re proud of. It’s a longer road, but it’s one worth traveling.
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Tuesday, 23 July 2013
Monday, 22 July 2013
Learn the Difference Between Motion and Action
It’s easy to spend your day spinning your wheels performing tasks that, at the time, make you feel productive. However, when the day ends you look back and can’t quite pinpoint what projects you pushed forward. One culprit: you’re confusing motion and action. James Clear explains on Medium:
Motion is when you’re busy doing something, but that task will never produce an outcome by itself. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will get you a result.
Here are some examples…
- If I outline 20 ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually write and publish an article, that’s action.
- If I email 10 new leads for my business and start conversations with them, that’s motion. If they actually buy something and turn into a customer, that’s action.
- If I search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that’s motion. If I actually eat a healthy meal, that’s action.
- If I go to the gym and ask about getting a personal trainer, that’s motion. If I actually step under the bar and start squatting, that’s action.
- If I study for a test or prepare for a research project, that’s motion. If I actually take the test or write my research paper, that’s action.
Sometimes motion is good because it allows you to prepare and strategize and learn. But motion will never — by itself — lead to the result you are looking to achieve.
Read his entire post here.
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Pay It Forward: Why Generosity Is The Key To Success
When it comes to when and how we help others, most of us fit into one of three categories:
- Givers, who help others unconditionally, demanding nothing in return.
- Matchers, who usually only help those who have helped them.
- Takers, those who demand help but never offer.
Penn professor Adam Grant is a Giver. He’s also the youngest tenured professor at Wharton and is the author of the best-selling Give and Take . Grant believes that the success of our careers is due to our generosity with our time and knowledge. Givers, he says, are usually either at the top or bottom of their field, with Matchers and Takers sprinkled in between.
After publicly proclaiming to the world that he answers any and all favor requests in the New York Times , Grant is the best test case for his own theory. However, Grant manages it all well thanks to being ruthless with his time. I asked him how he handles the deluge and if he has any advice for those of us who feel too squeezed to be good “Givers.”
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In the book, you write that Givers are either at the very top of their field or at the bottom. How do you make sure your giving helps, not hurts, your career?
Your effectiveness with giving depends largely on your time management skills. The main thing is to block out time for individual work and then time to be helpful. I have a particular day where I don’t answer any phone calls or emails. That day I’m writing, reading, or pushing forward one of my individual responsibilities. Then there are days where I block out time just to be helpful. It’s more efficient, less distracting, and lets me maintain a balance.
I try to focus on five-minute favors as micro-loans of my time. When something comes in, I ask myself if I’m in the position to help uniquely or can I pass them along to someone who might be more helpful. Sometimes, I farm the requests out to people that are in a better place to help.
I imagine people constantly want to pay you back.
Well, especially with the Matchers, but most people feel pressed to pay you back. I try not to ask them to pay it back, I try to ask them to pay it forward. Usually in the case of helping me help others. It’s really great to have a network of people willing to give back to be helpful.
It’s like you’re making a loan and getting interest. But even if they “pay” it elsewhere that’s emotionally fulfilling for you.
It is. The other aspect is that, when you encourage enough people to pay it forward, especially in certain networks [or workplaces], the norm spreads a little bit and more people get the help they need. If everyone is a taker, you have widespread paranoia, and you don’t get a lot of help or problem-solving. If everyone is a matcher, you can only go to the people that have helped in the past. If everyone is a giver you can go the person who is the best expert or most qualified to help. That helps everybody. That’s the benefit. You can create a more efficient exchange of ideas and resources.
Blocking out days to give sounds good, but what if my job is more regimented?
There are Fortune 500 companies where a group of engineers would have “quiet time.” Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. they’d have a no-interruption rules. You can negotiate those kinds of policies or practices.
Some people put up out-of-office replies that say, “I’m working on a really important project for the next four hours. If you really need me, please call me.” Do that and you’ll get emails back saying “oh we resolved this, don’t worry about it.” Or “I saw you were out of office, I really respect the fact that you prioritize important work. This is something I can follow up next week on.” It’s a good way to get people to respect your boundaries and it means that when you do make time for them, they appreciate it more.
Wharton Professor Adam Grant
You advocate being ruthless with your time. How have you seen that play out?
Whenever someone asks me for a meeting the first thing I ask back is, “What the agenda for this meeting and what contributions can be expected from me?” It’s amazing. Half the time they can’t answer. I have it as an auto-script at this point that I just paste in. What’s fascinating is that I often hear back, “Oh, I just really thought you wanted to be there.” And I say, “I appreciate you being polite, but if it’s no difference to you, I prefer not to be included.”
Related to that is to say, “I’ve been completely deluged with requests for meetings and if I took them all I’d get nothing done. What I’d appreciate is if you could write a couple of sentences about the contribution you’re looking for. I’ll do my best to provide it directly or connect you with someone who can.”
I imagine doing this with meetings may seem combative, but people respect you more.
It’s an open question. I hope so. I’m sure some people say, “This guy espouses Giver principles and doesn’t live by them.” My response there is, “I never said I should help all the people, all the time, with all the requests.” My priority is family first, students second, colleagues third. Everybody else comes fourth. If I can’t fulfill my commitment to those first three groups, that meeting is not something I’m going to be making time for.
You’ve seen thousands of students over the course of your career. You’ve also consulted with the world’s best executives. What are the skills that you feel people in college aren’t getting that they need in the “real world?”
I had an office hours conversation with a student who had just joined her 17th club. There’s no way you can meaningfully participate in seventeen clubs. This is the “fear of missing out” concept. It’s perverse, but the more you fear missing out, the more you actually miss out. Then you are peripherally participating in a bunch of things and have no meaningful engagement in anything.
Another thing that comes up is teaching students how to fail. Undergrads especially have this idea that they have to excel at everything they do. They say, “I need this pristine track record where everything I have ever tried has succeeded.” Obviously, that closes off learning opportunities. And that makes them less successful in the long run because they never discover their weaknesses. They never experiment with anything that’s not comfortable and it makes them less well-rounded and prepared for a complicated world.
There’s evidence that recruiters discriminate against 4.0′s. They’d much rather have a 3.8 who had a life. There’s a stigma that you’re a loser or perfectionist if you got perfect grades. That coping with failure is a lost art.
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Sunday, 21 July 2013
Reader Poll: What’s Your Note-Taking System?
A few days back, we highlighed Ben Casnocha’s view that experts take notes. Taking lots of notes sounds great, but can often be a time-consuming process. Serial note-takers among us: how do you take notes? What systems, shorthand, or tools do you use?
And for those that have trouble taking notes, what is the main barrier you’re facing?
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Saturday, 20 July 2013
Friday, 19 July 2013
Skim Books First
When reading non-fiction books, we can often feel compelled to sit down and read the book from cover to cover, trying to digest every morsel we can. Productivity blog Asian Efficiency reminds us that we should skim our books first so we can gain a better understanding of why we’re reading them in the first place:
The key with this process is not worry about “getting ahead of yourself” in the learning process – that’s just a silly, irrational fear left over from our education system where they punish people for trying to “rush ahead”.
The main objective of the skimming process is to familiarize yourself with the concepts of the book and to begin getting a conceptual overview of the material before you even start reading it. If you have access to a summary of the book (or if the book includes one), you can and should read that. If not, you can just skim through the concepts and form a first impression that way.
Read the entire post here.
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Thursday, 18 July 2013
Wednesday, 17 July 2013
The Creative Freedom of Getting Older
NYU professor and author Oliver Sacks writes about what it’s like to turn 80, and how old age has empowered him. A must-read for anyone who feels “past their prime:”
One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.
I am looking forward to being 80.
Read the rest of his essay here.
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Tuesday, 16 July 2013
Why You Shouldn’t Eat At Your Desk
If you’re trying to squeeze out every hour of productivity in your day, think twice about fusing your lunch hour with work. You could be sacrificing the restoration and renewal necessary for creative sustenance.
Harvard Business School lecturer and Extreme Productivity author Robert Pozen says in an interview with Fast Company:
If you start with the notion that having a quick sandwich at your lunch is productive in the sense that it takes less time, that’s true,” the author says. “But we don’t want a hard and fast rule—we want a functional rule.”
The desk-lunch efficiency might not be worth it, he says, if you could gain more from stepping away.
You could eat alone–perhaps away from a screen. Pozen says that since you’ll sometimes have a very full day, eating alone can help you restore your personal resources. And don’t pull out your phone: An absence of stimulation encourages associative or integrative thought, spurring your creativity. As well, if you have an idea that you’re working on in your head, eating alone allows you to continue uninterrupted.
Make sure that when you’re running out of fuel, you take the time to refill the gas tank.
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Monday, 15 July 2013
Sunday, 14 July 2013
Saturday, 13 July 2013
Friday, 12 July 2013
The Technology Skills We Need To Survive
Writer and entrepreneur Kevin Kelly details the skills needed to handle the influx of 21st century technology. Some of our favorites:
- You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode.
- Take sabbaticals. Once a week let go of your tools.
- What do you give up? This one has taken me a long time to learn. The only way to take up a new technology is to reduce an old one in my life already. Twitter must come at the expense of something else I was doing — even if it just daydreaming.
- Every new technology will bite back.
Read his entire list here.
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Thursday, 11 July 2013
Louis Armstrong on Practicing Your Craft
Two adults reflect on the time they interviewed Louis Armstrong for their high school radio station, and the insights they gleamed along the way.
(via The Loop)
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Wednesday, 10 July 2013
If You Don’t Have a Tough Constraint, Make One Up
Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Twitter and Medium Ev Williams had few constraints to deal with as he works on his latest project. He realized that this freedom came with a price — how could he ensure his team didn’t create something overly complex? How could he ensure they kept shipping, just like a small startup would? Williams writes:
Nothing clarifies focus like a date. (Or: If you don’t have a tough constraint, make one up.)
Historically, I’ve been constrained by engineering resources and money. These are good forcing functions to drive simplicity. It’s caused me no end of angst that I couldn’t make our products as great as I wanted to in the past.
With Medium, we have an engineering team that can build anything, matched with large ambitions, and plenty of capital. How do we ensure we don’t create something overly complex and/or fail to ship at all? By picking a date.
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Tuesday, 9 July 2013
Monday, 8 July 2013
How To Prepare For A Salary Negotiation: A Check List
Like buying a house or a car, our yearly salary has a massive impact on our financial well-being. As we’ve covered before, even a small raise in the beginning of your career can have outsized impacts for your life-time earnings. Yet we’re never taught how to negotiate.
“This is an opportunity to make thousands of dollars within a few minutes, you have to take advantage,” says Jim Hopkinson author of Salary Tutor: Learn the Salary Negotiation Secrets No One Ever Taught You . Come prepared, he says, and you put yourself leaps and bounds ahead of other candidates. We asked Hopkinson how creatives can be ready for the negotiating table:
1. Get in the right mindset.
If you’ve never negotiated before (or your last negotiation went poorly) it’s likely you have some preconceived notions about negotiations being adversarial or awkward. Instead, view the negotiation as a discussion and a partnership. When negotiating you need to aim for a “friendly but assertive” mindset that is often unnatural. Remember that you’re not being a nuisance, you’re taking control of your financial future, an admirable and necessary aspect of being a professional.
If you’ve gotten far enough to receive a job offer or raise, the company (or client) has already invested lots of time and mental energy in you and a little negotiation is not going to make them rescind their offer.
“They’re offering you the money and a job so it may appear that they hold all the cards, but you are offering stuff in return, too. You’re going to put in your expertise and bring your experience and work ethic to the table,” says Hopkinson.
2. Research a salary range.
Before you negotiate your salary, you need to have an objective measurement of what you’re worth on the open market. By providing facts and figures backed up by research you replace “I think I’m worth…” with “Someone in my position typically makes between $35,000 and $40,000.” The former is subjective and easily shot down, the latter is objective and encourages both sides to arrive at a fair number together.
“It shows you’re not pulling numbers out of thin air,” says Hopkinson. “Then it’s not you against me, we’re working together to make something that works for the both of us.”
To get a realistic number there are several resources at your disposal:
- The Department of Labor Statistics – The U.S. Federal government has comprehensive studies of widely held jobs organized by location.
- Glassdoor – Features salaries by company and, as a bonus, reviews of the interview process of select organizations.
- Salary.com – Enter in a job title and location and Salary.com will give you a range. Useful for negotiations to determine what the “top performers” are making in your field.
- LinkedIn job listings – Many LinkedIn listings have salary information. If you have a premium account you can even sort jobs by salary range in the sidebar.
- Your network – Before the negotiation, shoot emails to anyone you know who hires in your industry: “I’m applying for position X at a company in Chicago. My research tells me that the common range is $40,000-$50,000, does that sound right to you? If you were to hire someone for this, what would the range be?”
Remember to research comparable job titles and companies. One company’s “community manager” is another’s “customer service associate.”
3. Show your accomplishments.
If the negotiation is for a raise, rather than a new job, you should have materials that help demonstrate your value to the organization. Depending on your field, these can be projects pushed forward, a portfolio of work completed, or clients landed. Highlight ways you made and saved the company money. It’s likely that you one of many employees at your company, so a little refresher on your contributions can place all of your great work at the forefront your employer’s mind.
This can be anything from printed materials to an actual presentation. “I’ve had clients that did a little bit of everything and were able to show [using research] that if her company had to hire for her four different roles, it would cost them another $150,000 a year,” says Hopkinson. “So it’s planting that seed and the person she was negotiating with was probably thinking, ‘Oh God, I hope she doesn’t leave because it would be a nightmare.’”
4. Come ready to discuss more than money.
Numbers are only one side of the equation. You may offer a salary range and discover that the company can’t budge. In this case you can be willing to negotiate more than money. If you’re stonewalled on the salary, you can also discuss:
- Accelerated review schedule
- Additional vacation
- Conferences you’d like to attend (or other educational opportunities)
- Relocation fees
- An altered bonus structure
Hopkinson recalls one client who was told her salary couldn’t improve because salaries were standardized across the company. She pressed for more. “They came back and said, ‘We’ll give you a one-time bonus in January 2014, we’ll double the bonuses that we give you quarterly, and we’ll pay you for two months to live in the corporate housing for free when you move here.’”
The dollars for these perks often come out of different budgets than your salary. Teach yourself the phrase “are there any other compensation elements that we can discuss?”
“The main goal for you,” says Hopkinson, “is to be able to walk out of the room and say I was prepared and I did everything I could.”
5. Remember a few key phrases.
The best way to get good at negotiation is to know your numbers cold and then practice with a friend who takes different approaches each time you role play. To help deflect some common negotiation enders, you should teach yourself the following phrases and strategies before your meeting.
One of the cardinal rules of negotiation is that you should never be the first to name a number (read more rules of negotiation here). Sometimes, the other party will pressure you to come clean with what you make so they can adjust their offer accordingly. Deflect this with any of the below phrases.
“My current employment contract does not allow me to reveal that information, what kind of range did you have in mind?”
…
“As you know, it’s a really small industry that we’re in and I’m pretty sure my current employer wouldn’t be too happy if I was revealing what they’re paying over there, so let me ask you what kind of range did you have in mind?”
…
“You have much more information about this job than I do.”
…
“What’s in your budget?”
—
People are naturally conditioned to fill silences. When being made an offer, don’t feel compelled to answer right away. Remember: you’re in control of the conversation. Let any offers breathe and oftentimes, you’ll be on the offensive without saying a word as the other party rushes to fill the dead air.
Them: “What if we gave you a 6 percent bump in pay?”
You: “I see… [silence]”
Them: “…and an additional two vacation days”
—
When you present your salary, always do so in a range and mention that you’d like to be in the upper part of said range (provided you can back up that you are successful at your role). Never name a specific number as you could be “anchoring” the number lower than if you had waited.
—
And lastly, whenever you offer a number, always back it with facts that you’ve pulled from reliable sources.
How about you?
Have you successfully negotiated your salary or raise? What specific actions did you take?
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Sunday, 7 July 2013
Saturday, 6 July 2013
Friday, 5 July 2013
You’re Not a Freelancer. You’re a Teacher.
When working with clients it’s tempting to see projects as a journey from point A to point B. But viewing the relationship as a long-term opportunity to educate your clients in your field of expertise, can help you build more value and (hopefully) land more paid gigs. From the folks at Hourglass:
When you take the time to educate your clients on the problems that they’re experiencing and how your services/products can alleviate this pain, a few different things happen:
- They start to view you as an authority.
- They start to understand why they need you.
- They start to like you.
So, you can take the short-term approach to working with clients (“What words do you want to rank for? Just let us know and we’ll try and make it happen”) or you can play the long game (“Our newsletter actually has an upcoming article on SEO for small businesses just like yours, would you mind if we sent it to you?”). Which situation sounds like a win-win to you?
Read the entire post here.
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Thursday, 4 July 2013
Wednesday, 3 July 2013
Tuesday, 2 July 2013
Which Makes You More Productive: Rock Music or Classical?
The New York Times highlights a study where respondents who listened to music as they worked were more productive, and actually more persistent, than those who didn’t. The reason: it’s because music improves our moods, and allows us to stay in the moment longer, and focus a bit more. The New York Times Web editor Amisha Padnani writes:
Dr. Lesiuk’s research focuses on how music affects workplace performance. In one study involving information technology specialists, she found that those who listened to music completed their tasks more quickly and came up with better ideas than those who didn’t, because the music improved their mood.
The piece later goes on to say that having the individual select the type of music is an important factor in the process, and that instrumental music (without vocals) allowed respondents to work most effectively.
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Monday, 1 July 2013
Avoid The Pseudo-Work Trap
As he was doing research for his book, published author and Georgetown University Computer Sciences Professor Cal Newport discovered that many straight-A students spent much less time studying than everyone else thought.
Newport breaks it down on his blog:
If this sounds unbelievable, it is probably because you subscribe to the following formula:
work accomplished = time spent studying
The more time you study the more work you accomplish. The more work you accomplish, the better your grades. Ergo, straight A’s imply more work. Right? Then how do you explain me and my interview subjects…
To understand our accomplishment, you must understand the following, more accurate formula:
work accomplished = time spent x intensity of focus
To further illustrate his point, Newport shares an example:
Intensity of Focus over Time for Marathon Session Approach
hour 1 : 10
hour 2 : 9
hour 3 : 5
hour 4 : 2
hour 5-10 : 1[For math geeks, this is standard exponential decay.]
If we take the area under this curve, we see that the pseudo-worker has accomplished: 32 units of work.
Now let’s consider another approach. Assume, instead, that you break up the paper writing into two bursts. One burst you do for two hours Saturday afternoon. The other burst you do for two hours on Sunday morning. The long gap in between ensures your focus can recharge. Following the rates of focus decay used above, your chart looks like:
Intensity of Focus over Time for Short Burst Approach
hour 1 (sat) : 10
hour 2 (sat) : 9
hour 3 (sun) : 10
hour 4 (sun) : 9Clearly, this work schedule is much less painful. Just two hours at a time. And a whole day separating the two sessions. However, when we calculate the area under this curve, we see that the short burst approach accomplished: 38 units of work!
Don’t expect better results simply by putting in more hours, and don’t do ineffective pseudo-work just because it makes you feel productive (or less guilty). Instead, work in short bursts in order to make sure your focus gets a recharge and become more effective and efficient.
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Sunday, 30 June 2013
Saturday, 29 June 2013
Friday, 28 June 2013
Thursday, 27 June 2013
Wednesday, 26 June 2013
Give Yourself Enough Room to Play (And Fail)
Award-winning writer and comedian Ricky Gervais writes on his blog:
I don’t mean don’t become an adult with responsibility and the weight of the world on your shoulders. I simply mean if you’re writing or directing give yourself enough time to play. Play the fool. Goad. Shock. Laugh. Trip over something that isn’t there. Try something. And never be afraid to fail. That failure is useful too. It’s just another building block.
Essentially, Gervais makes two points on stimulating creativity: give yourself enough room to play (e.g., do something purely for fun’s sake), and engage in something with a high probability of rejection or failure.
Don’t take yourself too seriously! Once you’re done that work, recharge your juices by playing. Build something goofy. Draw something with your non-dominant hand. Record yourself playing the 20th Century Fox music on an unfamiliar instrument. That sort of thing.
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Tuesday, 25 June 2013
Monday, 24 June 2013
Sunday, 23 June 2013
Saturday, 22 June 2013
Friday, 21 June 2013
Thursday, 20 June 2013
Beware of Group-Think
There’s a reason you were hired and are part of your team. You bring your own unique insights to the table. But research shows us that even the best of us are susceptible to creativity-crushing group-think. OPEN Forum reveals a study in which a group of 12 people were ask to determine which of the lines on the right (bel0w) were the same length as the one on the left. The results are fascinating:
While the answer is obviously C, his studies showed that people who would otherwise be certain of their convictions could be “manipulated” into questioning their beliefs. This was not done through coercion, peer pressure or even incentives. Nine experiment participants were shown the above image and were asked to call out which line on the right was the same length as the one on the left. This was done 12 times. Only one of the nine participants was actually being tested. The other eight were “plants” and were told to purposefully call out incorrect answers.
Read more about the study at OPEN Forum, this month’s sponsor of Workbook.
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