Thursday 12th December 2024

Developing Expertise Improves the Brain's Ability to Concentrate

Expertise bulks up the brain’s ability to think deeply, a skill that may generalize across tasks

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Using ChatGPT to Make Better Decisions

A successful decision-making process has three steps: Framing the decision, generating alternatives, and deciding between them. Large language models can help at each stage of the process. But while it may be tempting to merely ask ChatGPT for answers, the real power of LLMs is how they can assist at each stage. Ask for help thinking of considerations you might be missing, or alternatives you might not have considered. LLMs can be a de-biasing tool, helping you frame and make the decision yourself.

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Are You Afraid to Identify as a Leader?

Studies have shown that seeing yourself as a leader is a critical first step on the path towards acting like one. And yet, many people are uncomfortable identifying as leaders. What drives this reluctance? While there are many factors at play, the authors’ recent research highlights the role of reputational fears in deterring people from viewing themselves as leaders. Specifically, they found that fears of seeming domineering, different, or unqualified made people in a variety of workplace and academic settings less likely to identify as leaders, in turn making them less likely to take on leadership responsibilities or be seen as leaders by others. The good news is, the authors also identified several strategies that managers can use to help reduce both the potency and negative impact of these fears, including presenting leadership as less risky, explicitly challenging negative stereotypes related to leadership, and making it clear through words and actions that leadership is a skill anyone can develop, rather than an innate ability.

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How Do You Get Into Sephora? 3 Tips for Startups, According to Artemis Patrick

Sephora struggled to ink partnerships with established beauty brands when it expanded to the U.S. in 1998, Artemis Patrick, the brand’s North America CEO, recently told Fast Company. So, to survive, she said, Sephora began incubating “baby brands” like Urban Decay and Benefit Cosmetics—which would, of course, go on to become household names.

This strategy made Sephora the world’s largest beauty retailer; it now has 3,000 stores globally and is projected to make over $2 billion in sales this year through its partnership with Kohl’s alone. And though Sephora is no longer snubbed by big makeup and hair brands, it still seeks out and signs exclusive partnership deals with promising startups. Milk Makeup, Glow Recipe, and Supergoop! are more recent success stories.


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How Project Repat Turns Scraps Into Socks

The Cambridge, MA-based company, which Lohr co-founded in 2012 with Nathan Rothstein, stitches its customers’ old t-shirts—from sports teams, college orientation groups, and what have you—into keepsake quilts, had just ranked 132 on the 2016 Inc. 5000. That recognition was good for business, but it meant more quilts and more scraps, Lohr says. That same year, they ended up getting a mobile storage unit full of the T-shirt scraps. 

“Every year there’s a new batch of graduates and that’s how our business sustains itself,” Lohr says. “But you don’t need the whole T-shirt to make the quilt. “This has always been the thorn in our side, from the very beginning.” 


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Why Apology is a Critical Leadership Skill

They’re broad, vague, meaningless turns-of-phrase, lovingly crafted by armies of lawyers hired by corporate shareholders to clean up whatever mess was purposefully made by a business in an attempt to maximize profits while minimizing effort.

Announcing how serious something is—that’s a backhanded implication that the wrongdoing was actually just a misunderstanding of the company’s priorities—an offense that can be papered over just by stating the opposite.


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Science Says This Is the Best (Practical) Way to Improve Your Memory, Recall, and Retention

For example, take the one about meetings. The fact that research shows meetings literally make people dumber – a 2012 study published in Transcripts of the Royal Society of London found that meetings, and how people sometimes behave in meetings, can cause you to temporarily lose IQ points – isn’t particularly surprising.

Nor is the fact most people feel the average meeting is a waste of time. A 2022 meta-analysis of more than a decade of studies published in Journal of Business Research found that 90 percent of employees feel meetings are “costly” and “unproductive,” and that they’re right: when the number of meetings was reduced by 40 percent, employee productivity increased by 70 percent.


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Mark Cuban Just Gave the Ultimate Pep Talk on Staying Positive in Crazy Times

Feeling exhausted after all the craziness of 2024? You are not alone. After so much election craziness, weird weather, brutal wars, and an endless parade of bizarre online trends and AI slop, a lot of us are ending the year feeling so mentally burnt out that the Oxford University Press named “brain rot” the word of the year. 

The billionaire co-founder of the Cost Plus Drug Company, former Mavs owner, and Shark Tank star certainly took his share of hits this year. A prominent advocate for Kamala Harris to the business community, Cuban definitely didn’t get his preferred election result. And as a power Twitter/X (now Bluesky) user, he’s seen plenty of online nastiness.  


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Economic Outlook: Who Wins the Fed vs. Financial Markets?

Economists and market commentators across the board expect the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates by 25 basis points on December 18, yet it’s difficult to decipher whether recent economic data justify the move. 

“With both sides of the Fed’s dual mandate (stable prices and full employment) heating up, it’s increasingly likely that the Fed has cut the federal funds rate by too much, too soon,” said Yardeni’s chief markets strategist Eric Wallerstein. 


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How Mario's Creator Taught a Brilliant Lesson in Emotional Intelligence, Backed By Science

So, to make his small character look more human, Miyamoto gave him a big nose. He added a mustache so there was no need to draw a mouth or show facial expressions, and a hat so the character’s hair wouldn’t need to be animated when he jumped. The high contrast red overalls and blue shirt completed the look.

The concept of changing the way you view constraints was laid out in the book A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business (Wiley, 2015), by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden, the founder and partner, respectively, of marketing agency Eatbigfish. Morgan and Barden argue that while many see constraints as restrictive and severely limiting, the opposite is true. Constraints can improve your work, make you better, and create opportunity.


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