Today I’ll look at the work of Uri Gneezy and John List. Specifically their book, The Why Axis. These are very well respected scholars and they are strong proponents of more real-world testing. Today I most want to highlight the idea that there are very sizable costs of not experimenting. Business Managers Under-Experiment The authors…
Category: Management Theory
Numbers Don’t Lie, But People Frame Decisions
Vaclav Smil’s book — Numbers Don’t Lie — is a helpful approach to understanding the world. He is able to layout what numbers mean answering a number of important questions around transportation, food, energy etc… The numbers are very helpful. That said, even though he mostly just outlines numbers you can see his perspective coming…
Progress Exists And Is A Good Thing
Matt Ridley is an interesting writer. A popular science/ideas writer he gives you his thoughts on a wide variety of subjects. I do admire his willingness to adopt an overarching narrative. To be honest, at times it can seem a bit too much for my tastes. His libertarian-esque views tend to see him damning a…
Use Of Humor In Business
I must confess to being a bit jealous of Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas. They get to teach a course on the use of humor in business. It seems like they have a great time doing it. They meet a lot of fun people and do a lot of interesting activities. (As well as doing…
What Are People Like? A Categorization
Before designing any intervention to influence them it is worth asking: What Are People Like? Derek Ireland in The Behaviorally Informed Organization presents what he calls a Boundedly Rational Complex Consumer Continuum, the shorthand being the BRCCC. (I am unsure why he thinks that is a pleasant and memorable acronym. I feel that I may…
Reduce Sludge In Your Organization
In this post, and the next, I will highlight some important ideas from The Behaviourally Informed Organization. (It is Canadian — this is not just me reverting to UK spelling). The first point I want to touch upon are the barriers that hinder people from taking the actions you want them to take. Such barriers…
Valuing Customers As Investments
I think of Sunil Gupta and Don Lehmann’s 2005 book, Managing Customers As Investments, as the third of the valuing customers books. (After Rust and colleagues Driving Customer Equity and Blattberg and colleagues, Customer Equity). It was written a few years after the others and I think that probably helps it read more cleanly. It…
Belief In Mythical Numbers
The strategy setting process in any organization is always an interesting one. Given its centrality to the idea of managing an organization you might think people had the process down. You would be wrong. Vikas Mittal and Shridhari Sridhar look at the strategy setting process through extensive interviews and surveys. It isn’t always a pretty…
Virtue Signaling And Balancing Reasonable Perspectives
Geoffrey Miller‘s Virtue Signaling is a compilation of some of his work. All pieces are relatively popular and accessible. In addition to sexual selection this tackles problems related to virtue signaling and balancing reasonable perspectives in speech. The Coddling of the American Mind was a clearly written thesis. Miller’s book is a little different to…
What Drives Customer Equity?
Around the turn of the millennium, there was a lot of interest in the idea of customers as financially relevant. Thus work started to concentrate on the idea of customer equity. Customer equity was sometimes equated with the idea of customers as assets. This is an important aim (even though I have some measurement quibbles)….
