461 Posts found for Source: Knowledge@Wharton

So, there’s a recent book by Scheve and Stasavage [Taxing the Rich, a History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe], who argued through a history of data from many countries, to look at what causes taxes on the high-income people to go up? And what causes redistributions to low-income people to go up? You might think rising inequality does that. But they … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert J. Shiller | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Economics

In 2007 Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were broke and looking to raise money to make their rent in San Francisco. They decided to rent out air mattresses in their apartment to attendees of a conference because all the hotels were booked. They called their service “Air Bed and Breakfast.” In a few years, this small experiment would create the hotel industry disruptor Airbnb. The … [ Read more ]

Content: Case Study | Author: Leigh Gallagher | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Industry Specific | Industry: Travel/Leisure | Company: Airbnb

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

What I’ve found is that in the recruiting process, soft skills are under-assessed. In other words, they’re not properly measured.

Once people get hired, they are often slow to be developed by the human resources people. Only when there is a problem, only when somebody gets passed over for promotion, does a person realize that they undervalued, underappreciated how much the soft skills were going to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James A. Runde | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Career, Human Resources, Success / Failure, Work

In the early phases of people’s career, the very first thing is adapting from the academic world to the business world. In the academic world, the teacher has the answer and is there to help you. In the business world, the boss is expecting you to come up with answer and you’re expected to help the boss, so everything’s turned on its head.

Content: Quotation | Author: James A. Runde | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Career, Work

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

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

Getting feedback once a year is totally not serving a purpose. It comes as a verdict, a judgment, whereas the intention here is to be course-correcting, to have coaching throughout the year.

Content: Quotation | Author: Anna A. Tavis | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Human Resources, Management

When it comes to workplace events that produce resentment and anxiety, few score higher than the big annual performance review. Calls to end this time-consuming and often unproductive practice have gone unheeded — until now.

Content: Article | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Human Resources

When President Bill Clinton signed the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in December 1993, he predicted that “NAFTA will tear down trade barriers between our three nations, create the world’s largest trade zone, and create 200,000 jobs in [the U.S.] by 1995 alone. The environmental and labor side agreements negotiated by our administration will make this agreement a force for social progress as well as … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Economics, International

General Electric used to force out the bottom 10% because they believed it was the A-player, B-player, C-player model. If your company’s doing that, you might want to actually look to see whether it’s true that your bottom 10% this year are the same as your bottom 10% next year. The problem is, if you keep firing your bottom 10%, you’re never going to know … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Cappelli | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Do people who perform well always perform well? And people who perform poorly, do they always perform poorly? The reason this matters is because there is a very prominent theory in the practice of management — something that Jack Welch made famous — about the A-player, B-player, C-player model. The folks at McKinsey & Co. were making a similar case that there are really good … [ Read more ]

Author: Peter Cappelli | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

The thing about performance appraisals is they are ubiquitous. There’s probably nothing in the field of management that is more common. And there’s also almost no practice in the world of business that people hate more. The evidence on this is pretty overwhelming. It’s also surprising how little we actually know about it. […] One of the things that we know from this is one … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Cappelli | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Human Resources, Management

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

What we were expecting to find is that we would have a long list of individual characteristics that would help us determine the composition of an effective team.

You would want a 10-year mix. You want to make sure you have gender diversity, you want extroverts, you want introverts, you want highly conscientious people — you want that whole mix. If we could quantify that mix, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Brian Welle | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

The amazing thing about organizations is, as human beings we all know how to do the basics. We know how to interact with each other. We can get through the day. We can work in teams relatively productively, but there is so much room to optimize all of that. If you can take a step back and understand the dynamics, you can actually help the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Brian Welle | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Changing the way executives in professional service firms are compensated can help organizations address some tough organizational dilemmas.

Content: Article | Author: Olivier Chatain | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

In domains like music, sports, where there’s a lot of individual training, you see the ratio between training and performance. You probably perform less than 1% of the time that you spent training. Whereas in business, it’s more like 99% performance and 1% training.

Content: Quotation | Author: Anders Ericsson | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Career, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Training & Development

A lot of people attribute groupthink to cohesion. They think that if we’re too close, if we trust each other too much […] then we’re not going to challenge each other. That turns out to be false. Cohesive groups often make the best decisions. People frequently when they trust each other are willing to challenge each other and say, “I know this person is not … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork