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What Really Makes Customers Buy a Product

Harvard Business Review

Most of the group instantly followed her. Each person was asked to report their experiences during the week of a brand in one of four categories: mobile handsets, soft drinks, technology products, and electrical goods. Fourth, build in peer observation to product launches. We discovered this by accident, but it makes sense.

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Crack the Leadership Code

Skip Prichard

Daniel Kahneman. Connection provides the spark that gets others to willingly follow your lead. The biggest thing that gets in the way of listening with purpose is quite simple: it’s offering up your complete and undivided attention. The answer might be the wake-up call you’re looking for. . We’re blind to our blindness.

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Why New Leaders Should Be Wary of Quick Wins

Harvard Business Review

So, you set out for early wins in what seem like obvious areas to fix — on the cost side, perhaps the speed of processes within production, and on the revenue side, the size of the sales force. Greg rolled up his sleeves and worked harder than he ever had, pushing the organization and himself.

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Income Inequality Makes Whole Countries Less Happy

Harvard Business Review

There might also be a psychological reason for the effect: an increase in the share of income held by the richest 1% can make you feel as if your chance of moving up the ladder and becoming very rich yourself is growing increasingly beyond your reach.

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Life is Luck — Here’s How to Plan a Career Around It

Harvard Business Review

Daniel Kahneman has claimed the following as his favorite equation: Success = talent + luck. Kahneman’s implication is that the difference between moderate and great success is mostly luck, not skill. If you imagine a game of “career roulette,” you end up a starving artist 99 times for every time you end up a rockstar.

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A Checklist for Making Faster, Better Decisions

Harvard Business Review

And then there is the unfortunate circumstance that economics in the twentieth century was based on the theory that people make rational choices when given good information, a theory proved to be somewhere between spotty and completely wrong thanks to a revolution in behavioral economics, led by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman.

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What I Didn’t Know About Becoming a CEO

Harvard Business Review

Of course, I believe in our product, which is the ability of our firm to deliver strong investment performance and competent service. But every Sunday evening, all year, every year, around 6:00 PM, I mentally travel around the globe, thinking about the direction of the stock market the following day and what that will mean for our holdings.

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