Check Here to Tip Taxi Drivers or Save for 401(k); The broadest lesson is that for better or for worse, default rules and settings have a great deal of power. Businesses and governments need to think hard about them

Check Here to Tip Taxi Drivers or Save for 401(k)

By Cass R. Sunstein – Apr 9, 2013

If you have recently been in a taxi in New York City, you may have noticed a credit-card touchscreen, which suggests three possible tips. For rides of more than $15, the suggested amounts are usually 20 percent, 25 percent or 30 percent. You can give a larger tip, a smaller tip or no tip at all, but it’s easiest just to touch one of the three conspicuous options.

The touchscreen makes everything simpler. It also raises an intriguing question: Do the suggestions affect the average tip? Behavioral economists would offer a clear prediction: Because people don’t like to do even a little bit of extra work, the suggestions will matter a lot, and the average tip will increase significantly.

The prediction has turned out to be right, with one important qualification: There’s a backlash effect, with more customers giving no tip at all. This natural experiment illuminates human behavior in a lot of diverse settings, and it has implications for business and for public policy as well.

The instructive study has been done by Kareem Haggag of the University of Chicago and Giovanni Paci of Columbia University, who have compiled data on more than 13 million New York taxi rides. Using the standard social-science jargon, Haggag and Paci describe the suggested percentages as “defaults,” in the sense that they establish what customers will do if they don’t exert extra effort. Read more of this post

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want (BK Business) [Paperback]

Beverly Kaye (Author), Julie Winkle Giulioni (Author)

Release date: September 17, 2012 | Series: BK Business

Study after study confirms that career development is the single most powerful tool managers have for driving retention, engagement, productivity, and results. Nevertheless, it’s frequently back-burnered. When asked why, managers say the number one reason is that they just don’t have time—for the meetings, the forms, the administrative hoops.

But there’s a better way. And it’s surprisingly simple: frequent short conversations with employees about their career goals and options integrated seamlessly into the normal course of business. Beverly Kaye, coauthor of the bestselling Love ’Em or Lose ’Em, and Julie Winkle Giulioni identify three broad types of conversations that will increase employees’ awareness of their strengths, weaknesses, and interests; point out where their organization and their industry are headed; and help them pull all of that together to design their own up-to-the-minute, personalized career plans.

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go is filled with practical tips, guidelines, and templates, as well as nearly a hundred suggested conversation questions. Read more of this post

How Hello Kitty Conquered the World; The cutesy Hello Kitty character came to be popular with everyone from small children to motorcycle gangs

April 12, 2013, 2:11 p.m. ET

How Hello Kitty Conquered the World

The cutesy Hello Kitty character came to be popular with everyone from small children to motorcycle gangs.

By MEGHAN KEANE

Hello Kitty, Japan’s most recognizable cartoon cat, prefers to be seen and not heard—a consequence of being drawn without a mouth. Created by Japanese merchandiser Sanrio in 1974, Hello Kitty is made up of nothing more than a few simple strokes: a black circle with ears, two button eyes, whiskers and a lopsided bow. Yet those features have been imposed on millions of products in the decades since, and millions of fans around the world use the image as a canvas for their personal expression. Hello Kitty has served as a mascot for adult women, gay men and punk enthusiasts. While most cartoon characters have a distinctive personality—Mickey Mouse, Ronald McDonald, Garfield—Hello Kitty is a cipher.

Pink Globalization

By Christine R. Yano
Duke, 336 pages, $24.95

Read more of this post

Wise advice from 1899: Sack the slothful and incompetent

Wise advice from 1899: Sack the slothful and incompetent

Created: 2013-4-13

Author:Wang Yong

AMERICA is known for its can-do spirit, but there’s never been a shortage of can’t-doers.

“A Message to Garcia,” written by artist and publisher Elbert Hubbard (1856 – 1915) in 1899, remains a definitive work, even today, on why a boss must honor the can-doers and curb, or can, the can’t-doers in the workplace.

A central message of the book: If the boss does not dismiss the less fit, that is, the can’t-doers, the business will never survive.

In fact, Hubbard wrote the book of about 30 pages in an hour in 1899 after an indifferent employee irritated him.

He said the book idea “leapt hot from my heart, written after a trying day when I had been endeavoring to train some rather delinquent villagers.” Read more of this post

Who’s Sorry Now? Everyone, Apparently; Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook shocked the world a couple of weeks ago when he apologized to the entire country of China. Joe Queenan thinks apologies by other corporate and cultural stars are badly needed

April 12, 2013, 8:29 p.m. ET

Who’s Sorry Now? Everyone, Apparently

By JOE QUEENAN

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook shocked the world a couple of weeks ago when he apologized to the entire country of China after complaints about Apple’s warranty policies, off-putting customer service and general haughtiness.

“We are aware that a lack of communications…led to the perception that Apple is arrogant and doesn’t care or attach enough importance to consumer feedback,” Mr. Cook wrote in an apology posted in Chinese on Apple’s Chinese website. Back on these shores, Apple has not yet issued any apology to U.S. consumers for being arrogant. Not in English, at least.

Ideally, Apple’s unexpected servility might inspire other putatively arrogant companies to issue apologies to entire societies. Particularly gratifying would be if the U.S. Postal Service posted a similarly worded mea culpa on its website. Read more of this post

Beyond Good and Evil; How vanity became “confidence,” and wrath a reason for therapy, rather than moral condemnation.

April 12, 2013, 3:07 p.m. ET

Beyond Good and Evil

How vanity became “confidence,” and wrath a reason for therapy, rather than moral condemnation.

By ELIZABETH LOWRY

Sin isn’t what it used to be. St. Paul counted 17 things that would automatically scupper a sinner’s chances of getting into the kingdom of heaven; by the fourth century, that catalog had shrunk to eight: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust and gluttony, as well as sorrow and boasting. Pope Gregory I dropped the last two offenses and added envy, giving us the shortlist of seven that we have been feeling guilty about ever since. Or at least professing to.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Edited by Rosalind Porter
Union Books, 203 pages, $24.95 Read more of this post

Making great decisions: Stanford’s Chip Heath and McKinsey’s Olivier Sibony discuss new research, fresh frameworks, and practical tools for decision makers

Making great decisions

Stanford’s Chip Heath and McKinsey’s Olivier Sibony discuss new research, fresh frameworks, and practical tools for decision makers.

April 2013 • Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony

Every few years, Stanford University professor Chip Heath and his brother, Dan, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE), distill decades of academic research into a tool kit for practitioners. The bicoastal brothers offered advice on effective communications in Made to Stick, on change management in Switch, and now, in their new book, Decisive, on making good decisions. It’s a topic that McKinsey’s Olivier Sibony has been exploring for years in his work with senior leaders of global companies and in a number of influential publications.¹

Chip and Olivier recently sat down to compare notes on what matters most for senior leaders who are trying to boost their decision-making effectiveness. Topics included Heath’s new book, research Sibony and University of Sydney professor Dan Lovallo have under way on the styles of different decision makers, and practical tips that they’ve found make a big difference. The discussion, moderated by McKinsey’s Allen Webb, represents a state-of-the-art tour for senior executives hoping to help their organizations, and themselves, become more effective by benefiting from the core insight of behavioral economics: systematic tendencies to deviate from rationality influence all of our decision making. Read more of this post

10-yr-old Chinese boy Wang Ke drives motorcycle over 18m-wide platform

10-yr-old boy drives motorcycle over 18m-wide platform

2013-04-12 09:21:57 GMT2013-04-12 17:21:57(Beijing Time)  SINA English

At the age of ten, Wang Ke cherishes ambition that most adults dare not to even give it a thought. Wang comes from Huaibei, a city famous for its abundance of coal in E China’s Anhui Province. He began to practice driving MTX motorcycle when he was only four. He succeeded in driving his motorcycle over a platform, 6 meters in height and 18 in width, in a national tournament on April 11th, marking a high point in the initial phase of his career. Wang said his dream is to participate in the racing game hosted by the American Motorcyclist Association.

Steal Like Picasso: How Outside Inspiration Can Fuel True Innovation

STEAL LIKE PICASSO: HOW OUTSIDE INSPIRATION CAN FUEL TRUE INNOVATION

PICASSO’S APOCRYPHAL LINE, “GOOD ARTISTS BORROW, GREAT ARTISTS STEAL,” CAN APPLY TO ANY INDUSTRY, NOT JUST ART–AND IT CAN CREATE REAL INNOVATION, NOT JUST DERIVATIVE KNOCK-OFFS, IF DONE CORRECTLY.

BY: CAMILLE SWEENEY AND JOSH GOSFIELD

Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist, has quoted Steve Jobs, who cited Picasso’s apocryphal line, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” No one knows for sure exactly what Picasso meant (or, for that matter, if he ever even spoke those words), but what is not in dispute is that Picasso was very clever when it came to theft. Instead of stealing from the celebrated artists of his day, which would have made him a second-rate version of Cézanne or Van Gogh, Picasso stole ideas from artists far outside his own milieu. Read more of this post