Archive for June, 2008

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

Irrationality In the Workplace

We’re continuing to go through the LinkedIn answers (over 400 so far) and making interesting discoveries. Some of the irational workplace anecdotes are of the funny/tragic type: a company director who attended a sexual harassment workshop and decided to hit on the trainer, or a guy who was asked by a manger to spend eight hours […]

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Friday, June 27th, 2008

Is that Catchup on your face?

Thanks to all the LinkedIn members who are responding to Ori’s question: “What are your best examples of irrational decision-making in the workplace?” Keep them coming. We’re still sorting through all the stories, but wanted to share a funny one brought to our attention by Michael Duffield. Watch this gender-bending commercial, which aired in England. When […]

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Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Ori featured on LinkedIn

Visit LinkedIn today to chime in about irrationality in the workplace.

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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

Ignore It and It Will Go Away

From an early age, Ori had a phobia about uncomfortable situations, especially when it came to delivering bad news.  Even as a kid, you could see it on his entire body: he’d squint his eyes, curl his toes, and try to circumvent the situation by any means necessary. He was always wary about how people would react—would […]

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Sunday, June 15th, 2008

The Psychology of Our Aunt Nira

Our aunt Nira is our mom’s younger sister. From birth, she was always one of our favorite people—it wasn’t because she carried a pack of gum with her or that we could always count on her to take us out to pizza.
Nira always had an unwavering belief in us. Neither one of us had self-esteem […]

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Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

A Tale of Loss Aversion

You’d think that if you offer billions of dollars to buy the typical CEO’s company, his eyes would instantly transform into cartoonish dollar signs.
Not so for Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, who repeatedly turned down buy-out offers from Microsoft.  Investor Carl Icahn criticized Yang’s decision as downright irrational.  We see his point, but we can also put ourselves […]

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Friday, June 6th, 2008

The Bomb

When a plane carrying live nuclear weapons turns out to be an air force mistake, you know there’s a problem. And the resignation of top executives is understandable. But according to Stanford professor emeritus Martin Hellman there’s another nuclear problem brewing, with even more dire consequences—and it’s all about the fact the we […]

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Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Three Times as Strong

Sarah, our editor at Doubleday, sent us this article about decision-making in groups. What’s interesting here is that if the same person repeats the same argument three times, the rest of the people in the group will chalk it up to three separate votes for a certain position.
In other words, the more you repeat something, […]

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Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Learning to Love Dissenters

To say that there’s no love lost between Scott McClellan and the White House is an understatement. McClellan ripped Bush and his buddies a new…well, let’s say his analysis was critical. The interesting thing for us, though, is why he didn’t speak up sooner. Sure, he was trying to protect his job—and yes […]

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Monday, June 2nd, 2008

The Sway Video

Check out this video of Ori produced by our friends from BNET.com
(shout out to Liz Kao) discussing SWAY.

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