Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.
The monkeys solved the puzzle simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward.
Autonomy isn’t the opposite of accountability – it’s the pathway to it.
Policy makers and business leaders take note: money matters. But often the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table—so that people can focus on the work rather than on the cash.
Anytime you’re tempted to upsell someone else, stop what you’re doing and upserve instead.
The Queen died. The King died.”“The Queen died. And the King died of a broken heart.”The first line was fact. The second line was a story. It placed the facts in context, added emotion and made us connect to it by making it memorable.
Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, a book that offers an entertaining and engaging overview of behavioral economics.
Never argue. To win an argument is to lose a sale.
A few of us are extraverts. A few of us are introverts. But most of us are ambiverts, sitting near the middle, not the edges, happily attuned to those around us. In some sense, we are born to sell.
The ability to take another perspective has become one of the keys to both sales and non-sales selling. And the social science research on perspective-taking yields some important lessons for all of us.
Typically, if you reward something, you get more of it. You punish something, you get less of it. And our businesses have been built for the last 150 years very much on that kind of motivational scheme.