When I first went overseas to Poland in 1997, I thought I knew how the media business worked. I had some experience selling national radio time in New York and thought I could teach the Poles who, after 50 years of communism, hadn’t had much opportunity to learn how a…

We all have ideas all the time. Some are good, but rather ordinary, (like spontaneously buying flowers for your wife on the way home), some are bad (like buying her a knife set for her birthday) and others, like Google’s PageRank are unquestionably great. Just a few stand out above…

“Don’t believe everything you think” has become something of a mantra of mine. It’s a simple idea, but desperately hard to accomplish. …

Experts have a lot of ideas about persuasion. Some suggest leveraging social proof, to show that people have adopted the idea and had a positive experience. Others emphasize the importance of building trust and using emotional rather than analytical arguments. Still others insist on creating a unified value proposition. These…

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, his first mission was not to create but destroy. He axed a number of failing products and initiatives, such as the ill-fated Newton personal digital assistant and the Macintosh clones. …

“The single most important message in this book is very simple,” reads the first line in John Kotter’s highly regarded The Heart of Change. “People change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings. …

The greatest misconception about change is that it’s about persuasion. All too often, we think that once people understand our idea, they will embrace it. Nothing can be further from the truth. …

Go to just about any business conference these days and you’re likely to see some pundit on stage telling a story about a company — often Blockbuster, Kodak or Xerox — that got blindsided by nascent trends. …

“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted,” is a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein, which I think aptly sums up the past 40 years. Since the 80s, we’ve been laser-focused on numbers and missed the underlying math. …