Costco, along with other fuel retailers, has been sued over the way it measures gallons of fuel in some states. The putative class plaintiffs have settled the case--for zero dollars for the class, and ten million dollars for the attorneys.
he story kicked off with the headline:
“The whole of the Beatles back catalogue will be made available to buy on iTunes, Yoko Ono has told Sky News.”But almost immediately after publishing the story Sky News killed it, leaving nothing but a blank pagein its wake. Google News had a cache of it for a brief time, but that too has apparently disappeared in record time. 9to5mac
And on "What are some of the ways leaders can avoid making bad decisions?"
- Leaders tend to rely on past experience that seems useful, but is actually sometimes dangerous.
- A second reason has to do with self-interest. Most people don't realize self-interest operates at a subconscious level.
- The third one is what we call prejudgments. Leaders make prejudgments about their businesses that sometimes turn out to be wrong.
- The fourth one is what we call attachments -- attachments to people or places or things.
People need to recognize that we are biased in every single situation. There's no such thing as objectivity.
The first thing leaders should do to reduce their odds of making bad decisions is walk into an important decision situation saying, "Ok, I know that we are potentially biased in a variety of ways. Let's try to identify what those are."
Second is to avoid the "yes man" trap. You have to bring different people and different data sources to the table. You want to add a "no team" to argue against the proposal, and put some teeth behind that no team.
I am not so sure that positive thinking is hard. An example would be the Endowment Effect. Sometimes, negative thinking is hard, when you have it, or already started it. Positive thinking is hard, when you don't have it yet, have not started it yet.[I]t's been shown over and over again that it improves performance over negative thinking.
Key question then: why do smart people engage in negative thinking? ...
The reason, I think, is that negative thinking feels good. In its own way, we believe that negative thinking works. Negative thinking feels realistic, or soothes our pain, or eases our embarrassment. Negative thinking protects us and lowers expectations.
In many ways, negative thinking is a lot more fun than positive thinking. So we do it.
If positive thinking was easy, we'd do it all the time. Compounding this difficulty is our belief that the easy thing (negative thinking) is actually appropriate, it actually works for us. The data is irrelevant. We're the exception, so we say.
Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.
