241 Posts Found

… what attracts human attention is change. […] if the temperature around you changes, if the phone rings — that gets your attention. The way in which a story begins is a starting event that creates a moment of change.

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert McKee | Source: Medium | Subjects: Attention, Marketing / Sales, Personality / Behavior

Narcissists can be disastrous for groups and organizations alike, because they typically want complete transformation even when the system is not broken. But when those narcissists are communal, it can temper much of the downside of narcissism. Instead of avoiding narcissists, organizations may be better served in selecting the right type of narcissist. Our research suggests that finding communal narcissists could bring the best of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Randall S. Peterson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior, Teamwork

Narcissists can be valuable when change is necessary and systemic, but more trouble than they’re worth at almost any other time.

Content: Quotation | Author: Randall S. Peterson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

In the affairs of life or of business, it is not intellect that tells so much as character — not brains so much as heart — not genius so much as self-control, patience, and discipline, regulated by judgment.

Author: Samuel Smiles | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Ability, Achievement, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

Purpose may point you in the right direction but it’s passion that propels you.

Content: Quotation | Author: Travis McAshan | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior, Vision

History does not repeat itself, nor does it follow given laws, as Karl Marx or Oswald Spengler have suggested. Nevertheless, it can be said that the human being has changed very little during the known course of history. We gain, therefore, valuable insight when we interpret current developments and the future in light of historical analogies.

Content: Quotation | Author: Hermann Simon | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: History, Personality / Behavior

The chains of habits are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Editor’s Note: often mistakenly credited to Warren Buffet or Samuel Johnson

Content: Quotation | Author: Maria Edgeworth | Subjects: Personal Development, Personality / Behavior

There are two different kinds of listeners. When you are working with clients, there are the people who listen to respond, and there are people who listen to listen. The person who listens to respond is basically the kind of person who can’t wait to get the microphone, and their sentence with the client or customer starts out, “Yes, but.” They’re basically an intellectual show … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James A. Runde | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

The ability to recognize, own, and shape your own emotions is the master skill for deepening intimacy with loved ones, magnifying influence in the workplace, and amplifying our ability to turn ideas into results. My successes and failures have turned on this master skill more than any other.

Content: Quotation | Author: Joseph Grenny | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Personal Development, Personality / Behavior, Success / Failure

Although life constantly puts you in these probabilistic situations, these situations that might lend themselves to statistical analysis, we don’t do that. People aren’t natural statisticians. They do something else. What they do is tell stories. They find patterns. Danny [Kahneman ] and Amos [Tversky] were showing the way the mind, when it’s telling stories to resolve uncertainty, makes mistakes.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Lewis | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

People are often cognitively lazy, not just cognitively biased. Our mental shortcuts and unconscious patterns of thought make everyone susceptible to the tactics of interpersonal influence: tactics that depend on the norm of reciprocity, accepting and obeying authority (or its symbols), the power of liking, the value created by scarcity, and the tendency to escalate levels of commitment, even in the face of negative outcomes. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior, Persuasion

When executives tell me that flattery doesn’t work and that people can see through strategic efforts to garner their support, I cite extensive evidence showing that we are generally quite poor at discerning deception. When the deception is coming from a master deceiver and consummate politician like [Lyndon] Johnson, the odds of successful resistance are quite low.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior, Persuasion

Why are we drawn to authenticity? Part of it is an attempt to individuate ourselves and find something that’s different and more appealing to us than it is to the masses. We all do that. We find satisfaction and gratification in it. And I think that’s fine. There are theories that it has to do with the loss of identity in mass society — that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Glenn R. Carroll | Source: Stanford University | Subject: Personality / Behavior

We don’t decide about life; we’re captured by life. In the major spheres, decision-making, when it happens at all, is downstream from curiosity and engagement. If we really want to understand and shape behavior, maybe we should look less at decision-making and more at curiosity. Why are you interested in the things you are interested in? Why are some people zealously seized, manically attentive and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Attention, Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

It’s hard to find a decision or behavior that isn’t affected by other people. In fact, looking across all domains of our lives, there is only one place we don’t seem to see social influence — ourselves.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jonah Berger | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior

… people attach emotion to individuals. They love rooting for people. They love experiencing the world through others’ eyes. The more you can tell stories about actual people that connect to the broader purpose, the more your audience will feel and not simply hear what you are trying to tell them.

Content: Quotation | Author: Don Faul | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Motivation, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior, Storytelling

Much of human error is not even attributable to a systematic cause, but to “noise.” When people think about error, we tend to think about biases. […] But in fact, a lot of the errors that people make is simply noise, in the sense that it’s random, unpredictable, it cannot be explained.

Content: Quotation | Author: Daniel Kahneman | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior, Thought

Content: Quotation | Author: Alex Charfen | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

You might think about leadership as having to do with the intersection of psychology and business knowledge. All leaders have both an agenda they’re driving and an agenda that’s driving them. The agenda you’re driving is the business part of it. The agenda that’s driving you is the psychology part.

The agenda that you’re driving seems to me highly mutable because it’s dependent on lots of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert Kegan | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Leadership, Personality / Behavior

At a deep level, no matter where we come from, we are driven by common physiological and psychological needs and motivations. Yet the culture in which we grow up in has a significant bearing on the ways we see communication patterns as effective or undesirable, to find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, to consider certain ways of making decisions or measuring time “natural” or … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Erin Meyer | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Culture, Decision Making, International, Personality / Behavior, Thought