Monthly Archive: December 2010

An Update to Lost: Univeristy of Michigan Study on Empathy

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

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Forecasting – Why VP of Sales is the Most Fired Position in Corporate America

The reason that the VP of Sales is the most fired position in corporate America is not because, as you might think, the sales forecast is the single most visible number. It’s because too many organizations and too many VPs succumb to the temptation of having multiple forecasts. The challenging one they think you can make, and the inflated one that no one believes you can make but the one they tell you because they don’t trust you to make the one that is challenging. When forecasting is a negotiation game, everyone loses.

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Rationality is Crazy

Reason and logic, while they seem to form the basis of many sales and marketing campaigns, are not sufficient for their purposes. Why? Because we humans are not rational actors. Ninety-five percent of our thought is unconscious and dependent on frames, metaphors, stories and narratives that help us make sense of complex situations.

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