March 16th, 2012
Tags: Problem Solving. In the latest issue of Psychological Science, Dr. Tony McCaffrey discusses a systematic way of breaking through seemingly difficult problems that have left you feeling “stuck.”
McCaffrey has developed a systematic way of overcoming that obstacle: the “generic parts technique” (GPT), which he describes in the latest issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. …
Here’s how GPT works: “For each object in your problem, you break it into parts and ask two questions,” explains McCaffrey, . . .
→ Read More: Becoming Unstuck: Solving Challenging Problems
There’s a great article on Results Only Work Environments (a concept pioneered at Best Buy (NYSE: BBY)) over at HBR blogs:
Most employers still tell their employees when to come to work, when to leave, and how they’re expected to work when they’re there. Why not measure employees by the value they create, rather than by the number of hours they sit at a desk?
Too many companies continue to operate by the premise that their employees can’t be fully trusted, . . .
→ Read More: HBR: Reward Value, Not Face Time
Mihir Desai published an article in Harvard Business Review that discusses the many problems with compensating managers with stock and options:
Stock-based pay for corporate executives and high-powered incentive contracts for investment managers have dramatically altered incentives on both sides of the capital market.
Unfortunately, the idea of compensation based on financial markets is both remarkably alluring and deeply flawed: It seems to link pay more closely to performance, but it actually rewards luck and can incentivize dangerous risk taking.
. . .
→ Read More: HBR: The Incentive Bubble
February 28th, 2012
A new study by Dartmouth economists Jonathan Zinman and Eric Zitzewitz (who I assume met while waiting during roll call) assesses the role of technology in reducing the exaggerated content in advertising.
First, they find evidence that ski resorts exaggerate the amount of fresh snowfall on weekends:
Having found some evidence that deceptive advertising varies within resorts over time along with payoffs, we next explore whether deceptive advertising varies across resorts with plausibly different payoffs. Weekend effects in resort reporting are . . .
→ Read More: Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising?
February 28th, 2012
Tags: IQ. From The New York Times:
The study is certainly provocative. Even after taking into account factors like income and education, the authors concluded that people with relatively high I.Q.’s typically diversify their investment portfolios more than those with lower scores and invest more heavily in the stock market. They also tend to favor small-capitalization stocks, which have historically beaten the broader market, as well as companies with high book values relative to their . . .
→ Read More: What High-I.Q. Investors Do Differently
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