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Overview
Mastering the Human Element. Practical business meets the psychology behind how we work, decide, and lead. Smart tools and grounded writing for people who run things and want to understand people.
News
In 1957, Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders told America that supermarkets had hired motivational researchers to slow shoppers' eye-blink rates from 32 a minute to 14 in the cereal aisle - a "hypnoidal trance" said to lift impulse buys by a third, and the panic it set off drove the first federal scrutiny of subliminal selling
The cereal aisle story is the most repeated supermarket legend of the twentieth century: shoppers walking past the Corn Flakes, blink rate dropping from 32 per minute to 14, eyelids slowing into something close to a hypnotic stupor while their hands reach
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When Ed Catmull instituted the Braintrust at Pixar in the late 1990s, the rule was that the assembled directors could critique any film in development but had zero authority to mandate changes - Catmull argued that the moment feedback carried power, honest feedback would disappear from the room within one meeting
The Pixar Braintrust had one rule that made everything else work: the directors sitting around the table could tear a film apart, scene by scene, but the filmmaker on the receiving end was under no obligation to change a single frame. Ed Catmull, who desc
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When Warren Buffett bought Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, it was a failing New England textile mill - he later called the purchase the worst trade of his life and estimated the decision to use it as his holding company instead of starting fresh cost sharehol
Buffett's 1962 acquisition of a dying textile mill became one of the most expensive emotional decisions in financial history - and his most-told mistake.
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As company lore tells it, a worker at Procter & Gamble's Cincinnati factory left a soap-mixing machine running through lunch in 1879 - the air-whipped batch floated in customer washbasins, complaints arrived asking for more of the floating soap, and Ivory's '99 and 44/100 percent pure' campaign was built on what looked like a mistake
The most quoted purity claim in American advertising history started with a worker who walked away from his job to eat lunch. Sometime in 1879, inside Procter & Gamble's Cincinnati factory, a soap-mixing machine kept churning while its operator stepped ou
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When Rollin King and Herb Kelleher sketched the Southwest Airlines route map on a cocktail napkin at the St. Anthony Club in San Antonio in 1966, the three-city triangle between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio was chosen because Texas law let intrastate carriers avoid federal price regulation - the loophole let Southwest charge half what competitors did
The cocktail napkin is the part of the story everyone remembers. The legal architecture underneath it is the part that actually built Southwest Airlines. When Rollin King grabbed a cocktail napkin in front of his San Antonio lawyer Herb Kelleher and sketc
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When Shigeru Miyamoto designed Donkey Kong in 1981, Nintendo of America had 2,000 unsold Radar Scope cabinets sitting in a warehouse - Miyamoto's team shipped only the new circuit boards and bezels from Japan, and a six-person crew including Minoru Arakawa and his wife Yoko gutted the cabinets by hand in Redmond, Washington to save Nintendo from bankruptcy in its first US year
In the summer of 1981, Nintendo of America held roughly 2,000 unsold Radar Scope arcade cabinets - a Space Invaders knockoff that American operators had rejected after a brief novelty run. The cabinets had originally shipped to a New Jersey warehouse in l
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