The Case for A Behaviorial Strategy - McKinseys

Once heretical, behavioral economics is now mainstream. Money managers employ its insights about the limits of rationality in understanding investor behavior and exploiting stock-pricing anomalies. Policy makers use behavioral principles to boost participation in retirement-savings plans. Marketers now understand why some promotions entice consumers and others don’t. Yet very few corporate strategists making important decisions consciously take into account the cognitive biases—systematic tendencies to deviate from rational calculations—revealed by behavioral economics. It’s easy to see why: unlike in fields such as finance and marketing, where executives can use psychology to make the most of the biases residing in others, in strategic decision making leaders need to recognize their own biases. So despite growing awareness of behavioral economics and numerous efforts by management writers, including ourselves, to make the case for its application, most executives have a justifiably difficult time knowing how to harness its power.

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The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions - Dan Ariely - HBR

The heat of the moment is a powerful, dangerous thing. We all know this. If we’re happy, we may be overly generous. Maybe we leave a big tip, or buy a boat. If we’re irritated, we may snap. Maybe we rifle off that nasty e-mail to the boss, or punch someone. And for that fleeting second, we feel great. But the regret—and the consequences of that decision—may last years, a whole career, or even a lifetime. At least the regret will serve us well, right? Lesson learned—maybe. Maybe not. My friend Eduardo Andrade and I wondered if emotions could influence how people make decisions even after the heat or anxiety or exhilaration wears off. We suspected they could. As research going back to Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory suggests, the problem with emotional decisions is that our actions loom larger than the conditions under which the decisions were made. When we confront a situation, our mind looks for a precedent among past actions without regard to whether a decision was made in emotional or unemotional circumstances. Which means we end up repeating our mistakes, even after we’ve cooled off.

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Define Your Personal Leadership Brand in Five Steps - Harvard Business Review

You probably already have a personal leadership brand. But do you have the right one? The question is not trivial. A leadership brand conveys your identity and distinctiveness as a leader. It communicates the value you offer. If you have the wrong leadership brand for the position you have, or the position you want, then your work is not having the impact it could. A strong personal leadership brand allows all that's powerful and effective about your leadership to become known to your colleagues, enabling you to generate maximum value. What's more, choosing a leadership brand can help give you focus. When you clearly identify what you want to be known for, it is easier to let go of the tasks and projects that do not let you deliver on that brand. Instead, you can concentrate on the activities that do. So how do you build a leadership brand?

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IDEO's Tim Brown on Using Design to Change Behavior - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Many large-scale phenomena are the sum of individual actions — sometimes millions or even billions of them. Apple's recent celebration of 10 billion songs downloaded represents 10 billion choices made by consumers to download a song rather than buy it in other formats. In the healthcare space, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported a 50 percent drop in respiratory infections in children, a drop attributable (in part) to the group's campaign to educate millions of children to change their behavior: To wash their hands. But what does it take to bring about such mass behavior shifts? Are there approaches that businesses could use, too, to influence behaviors on a micro level, and gain benefits on a macro one?

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The Pursuit of Flow and Why It is Important To Work and Personal Satisfaction

There is a scene in the movie “The Hustler” where Fast Eddie, played by Paul Newman, says: “It’s a great feeling, boy, it’s a real great feeling when you’re right and you KNOW you’re right. It’s like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue is a part of me… you don’t have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody’s ever made before.” What the character is describing is being in a state of flow—that enthralled state, when your level of skill matches the level of the challenge. You become so engrossed in what you do that you forget to eat. You escape time. We’ve all been there. It’s what athletes call “being in the zone” and what musicians refer to as “being in the groove.” The concept of flow is the brainchild of psychologist Mihali Csikszentmihalyi. In an interesting talk a few years ago, Csikszentmihalyi talks about the concept of flow and about his more recent book, Good Business: Flow and the Making of Meaning. In it he writes that success is being involved in an endeavor that helps others and, at the same time, makes you feel happy.

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