Everyday Low Prices was one of the most brilliant marketing slogans of the 90s. The idea that you could saunter into a big box retailer without your shoebox filled of condensed milk coupons and know that you were still going to get the best deal foreign labor markets could provide was nothing short of a [...]

Whether you are trying to build a Fortune 500 company or tap dance on the moon, success in anything is a two step dance. The first is understanding what you need to do. This is tricky because the foundations of “what you need to do” are most often built on quicksand. It’s tricky, there is [...]

Every so often you should embrace being wrong – Sometimes we hate being wrong because of the consequences. Mistakes can cost us time and money, expose us to danger or inflict harm on others, and erode the trust extended to us by our community. Yet even when we are wrong about completely trivial matters — [...]

I think this will be one of the key sociological changes driving new styles of business and entrepreneurship in the coming decade – People between 20 and 34 are taking longer to finish their educations, establish themselves in careers, marry, have children and become financially independent, said Frank F. Furstenberg, who leads the MacArthur Foundation [...]

Your iPhone really is an extension of yourself despite what your spouse tells you – An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves. The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged [...]

Sometimes you just need to stop and enjoy the silence – We tend to think of the pause as awkward. In speech, pregnant pauses connote uncomfortable silence; we veil silence with fillers. As professional communicators, we’re trained to deliver smooth speech, censoring out “um” and “ah.” This distaste for the pause — and the inverse, [...]

Food for thought. Like all things genetic though, one should remember that genes are only one piece of an amazingly complex cocktail of factors that determine outcomes. Monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) is an enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters (signal­ing chemicals) in the brain. Previous studies have linked the low-efficiency versions of the MAOA gene—the variants [...]

Eventually systems like this will funnel into civilian technology, and that will be utterly fascinating. Imagine the “great silence” evolving out of technology-induced telepathy. During the last decade, the Pentagon’s DARPA launched the “Advanced Speech Encoding Program” to develop nonacoustic sensors for speech encoding in acoustically hostile environments, such as inside of a military vehicle [...]

Volunteer at something you’re good at, brilliant idea. Alas, the nonprofit world is soon to be flooded by an army of Social Media strategists. The problem is that most professionals are stuck behind client relationships, deadlines, and the pressures of delivering that next mock up or strategy. The thought of wading into an unstructured, disorganized, [...]