Forbes has a very good piece on the pitfalls of perception, with special attention to how it applies to entrepreneurs. Here are some other good links from around the web that you might have missed…
Edward Tufte is the minister of information, figuring out the best ways to present information visually.
Behavioral economics is cool, but what about behavioral operations?
20 ways to use LinkedIn effectively.
Ten sales and marketing tips I learned from strippers. Funny, but also very true. (warning, contains profanity).
A new book claims that the devil's advocate can kill innovation and, if you want to use it, add these other "personas" to the mix.
Check it out: A list of the best business credit cards.
Yeah, there’s probably a danger that devils advocacy will kill innovation. But there are at least two circumstances in which devils advocates should always be required:
1)Mergers & acquisitions. These seem to bring out the corporate mating instinct, and when people are in heat to do a deal, common sense often goes by the wayside.
2)Big, long-term product development projects (and also internal IT projects), especially those that have names like “the X project.” These often become sacred cows and continue long after it should be apparent that they are either infeasible or not very valuable.
Ironic that a Forbes article on the pitfall of perception (or the cognitive bias that makes us dumb) would include the sentence “Large corporations spend fortunes on risk-management departments to deal with this developmental deficiency.”
They do? How about some proof? Okay… and if they do how does “spending a fortune” translate into doing something effective? There’s plenty of big company research that says the big are no smarter (for all their spending) and just as prone to the biases that cause terrible decision making. But of course one bias is the perception that the “big” are that way out of intent rather than luck.
David,
That’s a good point. I’m surprised that M&A deals aren’t scrutinized more, given that study after study has shown that the majority of them are bad decisions.
Laurence,
That sentence probably should have read “Large corporations WASTE fortunes…” given that they really aren’t any more effective (as a whole) than small companies.