Selling to Mr. Spock
Nowhere am I so desperately needed as among a shipload of illogical humans. -Spock in 'I, Mudd' Star Trek's iconic Mr. Spock was half-Vulcan, half-human. It's the former we first…
Nice Place Here, Shame if Anything Happened
It's the opening to dozens of gangster movies. The mob guy with a rakish hat and a sneer sidles into the hard-working good citizen's retail establishment, knocks some cigarette ash…
The Number One Mental Illness in Business
Sometimes we don't think right. Often we don't think right, and we don't even notice it. (This is well-described in a book called Blind Spot, by Banaji and Greenwald). People in…
Expense Sheets and Cultures of Trust
Business travelers know the taxi expense fiddle. You ask the taxi driver for a receipt. He winks at you and gives you a blank form, implying you can fill it…
Unconscious (Ethical) Incompetence: The Curious Case of SAC Capital Advisors
Noel Burch is credited with formulating the Four Stages of Competence model. It describes the psychological states involved in a progression of competence, as in: 1. Unconscious Incompetence 2. Conscious Incompetence 3. Conscious…
8 Ways to Make People Believe What You Tell Them
Credibility is one piece of the bedrock of trust. If people doubt what you say, all else is called into doubt, including competence and good intentions. If others don't believe…
How to Increase Trust in Organizations
I was grocery shopping Saturday. It was 2PM, 96 degrees out – pretty hot for New Jersey – and I was in the checkout line. The cashier had started sliding my purchases through…
The Tricky Relationship Between Auditing and Ethics
We should all do the right thing. Yet the wrong thing often gets done. Indeed, you can't always trust everyone to do the right thing. And so we have evolved enforcement…
How Neuroscience Over-reaches in Business
Every age has its fads and fashions. Some of them hold up over time – competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, quality circles. Applying neuroscience to business, I suggest, will not…
Know Yourself. Wait, what does that even mean?
In college, I majored in philosophy. I underlined all the important parts in my texbooks – the hard, the empirical, the deductive, the categorical. I underlined about half of each…