651 Posts Found

The question is why, having identified these cognitive illusions or whatever you want to call them, they persist. We don’t pay more attention to them. […] It’s very hard for a person to self correct. What you can do, Amos [Tversky] would say, is change your environment in which you make decisions, so people are more likely to point out to you if you’re making … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Lewis | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Thought

We narrow our decision-making frame when we believe we know what the future will look like. We implicitly assert that everything is locked in except for what we will do, and so we ask this simple, efficient question: “What should we do?”

Should asks people to spot and advocate the one right decision. It treats decision making as a debate. It drives toward closure. We need … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Mark Chussil | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Strategy, Thought

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.

Content: Quotation | Author: Albert Szent-Gyorgyi | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation, Thought

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

The wealth of humanity is limited by our ability to produce goods and services of value. The production of goods and services of value increasingly rests on the collection, processing and management of information. There is no value without the knowledge of what can be produced, what ought to be produced, and how it can be produced most effectively. It is the information-processing structures of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Avent | Source: Evonomics | Subjects: Economics, Information

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 a common complaint among top executives: “I’m spending all my time managing trivial and tactical problems, and I don’t have time to get to the big-picture stuff.” And yet when I ask my executive clients, “If I cleared your calendar for an entire day to free you up to be ‘more strategic,’ what would you actually do?” most have no idea. I often get … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Personal Development, Time Management, Work

If you want to understand the future, just look at what rich people do today.

Content: Quotation | Author: Hal R. Varian | Source: Medium | Subjects: Future, Innovation, Management, Market Research

Intuition is very good — provided that you have [first] gone through the exercise of systematically and independently evaluating, the constituents of the problem. Then when you close your eyes and generate an intuitive, comprehensive image of the case, you will actually add information.

Content: Quotation | Author: Daniel Kahneman | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Thought

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

Teams that fall in love with a problem have more successful outcomes than teams that fall in love with particular solutions. This is because knowing that a problem is worth solving continues to be motivating even when a team doesn’t come across the right solution on the first, second, or Nth try.

Content: Quotation | Author: Julie Zhuo | Source: Medium | Subjects: Challenge, Motivation, Organizational Behavior, Problems / Solutions, Teamwork

There has been much discussion about the effects of rampant automation on the economy and on the labor market in particular. There has been much less attention paid to its effects on human talent and motivation. But what decades of human-factors research tell us is that when computers and other machines take challenging tasks away from us, we turn into observers rather than actors. Distanced … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Nicholas G. Carr | Subjects: Economics, Organizational Behavior, Skills

We have a much better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. The moment I hit send on that draft, it’s out of my mind, whereas when I leave it open, then I’m constantly processing it. I’m seeing new possibilities.

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation, Thought

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

Elevating the creation of shareholder value to the status of primary objective is based on a faulty assumption—that capital is the scarcest resource in an economy, when in reality it’s knowledge that’s the scarce, critical ingredient in solving problems. […] This is not to say that shareholders or other owners are unimportant. But providing them with a return that is competitive compared with the alternatives … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Eric Beinhocker, Nick Hanauer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, Knowledge

Even experts can be blind to important features of their subjects. I have done a lot of work on country competitiveness, but if anybody had asked me in 2000 to name the top 100 conditions that underpin a thriving economy, I wouldn’t have mentioned “a well-functioning land registry system.” Then I read [Hernando] de Soto’s compelling case that the ability to get clear title to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Economics, Expertise, Knowledge

When we lose confidence that people have the will to do the right thing, and we turn to incentives, we find that we get what we pay for. […] There is really no substitute for the integrity that inspires people to do good work because they want to do good work. And the more we rely on incentives as substitutes for integrity, the more we … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Barry Schwartz | Source: Brain Pickings | Subjects: Human Resources, Integrity, Management, Motivation, Organizational Behavior

When organizations reward people—whether through reputation, opportunities, or promotion—for saving money even if they waste time, employees orient their behavior accordingly.

But organizations can take actions that will start to change this mind-set. For example, company leaders could start counting time as carefully as they count money. Projects and organizational initiatives can have time budgets just as they do financial budgets, enabling organizations to track whether … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jennifer J. Deal | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Time Management

Also known as the “outcome effect,” outcome bias is a cognitive process that causes individuals to evaluate a decision based on the final result, whether that outcome was achieved by chance or through a sound process. When a good outcome results, the entire effort is judged positively. Conversely, a sound decision process may be condemned if the end product is negative for reasons unrelated to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric McNulty | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Luck, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior