Archive for June, 2010

Last year, the folks at Volkswagen and Fun Theory devised an engaging (and musical!) way for people to exit a subway station. Now they’ve come up with a equally engaging way for people to enter a subway station. (Someone should do a story about subterranean behavior modification. There are lots and lots of examples – […]

Should you psych yourself up with confident declarations — or ask yourself questions about whether you’re up to the job? In my latest Sunday Telegraph column, I turn to a team of University of Illinois researchers — and the legendary management theorist Bob the Builder — for the answer.

From the playing fields of 21st century America to the killing fields of 20th century Europe, here are two interesting perspectives on motivation. The first comes from Los Angeles Dodgers manager Joe Torre, who’s interviewed in the new BusinessWeek and explains why he left a job managing the New York Yankees: “I was offered a very […]

In 2003, my pal Mark Frauenfelder (one of the impresarios behind Boing Boing) and his wife Carla Sinclair — two young parents suffering from dot-com bubble burnout — distilled their frustration into a brief manifesto. They made a vow: To take more control of our lives; To cut through the absurd chaos of modern life and […]

Haya El Nasser analyzes some just released Census data in this morning’s USA Today and offers up this stunner: Today, while 19.9% of Americans over 65 are racial minorities, 48.3% of kids under age 5 are. Now imagine the complexion of this country 40 years from now, when (most of) those older folks are gone and (most […]

Above is a remarkable 10-minute animated video about Drive. Over the past few weeks, several people who’ve watched it have asked me how I created such an elegant and compelling piece. Today I provide the answer: I had almost nothing to do with it. In January, I did a book talk at the RSA in […]

Give customers what they want. It’s a sturdy principle of business, one that most of us endorse.  But it’s also a principle that can carry seeds of its own demise. And nowhere is that clearer than in the suddenly wild and wooly world of journalism. As newspapers disappear and big media’s business models crater, there’s […]

For all the talk we hear about “work-life balance,” it sure doesn’t feel like life is getting any easier or work less stressful. Tony Schwartz’s new book, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, looks at the four basic needs all human beings share once the bare necessities of survival have been met: the need for […]