How Effective Is a Number-crunching Approach to Managing People?

How Effective Is a Number-crunching Approach to Managing People?

Mar 21, 2014

Human resource professionals have begun to use sophisticated data analysis for all sorts of people-related issues ranging from recruitment and performance evaluation to promotion and compensation. People analytics, as this approach is called, is making waves because it is said to eliminate biases that exist in human judgment. Cade Massey, practice professor of operations and information management at Wharton, works at the intersection of psychology and economics and has focused on this approach. His expertise is judgment under uncertainty, looking at optimism, overconfidence and learning. Massey’s research is based on both laboratory experiments and archival studies of real-world behavior, such as the draft picks of professional football teams and the investment decisions of employees holding stock options. Read more of this post

Why ‘Incomplete’ Products Increase Consumption

Why ‘Incomplete’ Products Increase Consumption

Mar 20, 2014

Barbara E. Kahn, professor of marketing and director of the Jay .H. Baker Retailing Center, is the chair of the Retail and Consumer Goods Summit, a conference that Knowledge@Wharton is organizing in collaboration with the Baker Retailing Center on April 28 and 29 in New York City. Her research interests include consumer choice, variety seeking, product assortments, brand management and retailing. Read more of this post

Building the Next Pixar

BUILDING THE NEXT PIXAR

Some of Pixar’s most illustrious alums, steeped for decades in Pixar’s potent creative culture, reveal how they apply the company’s philosophies of success to their own ventures–and you can, too. Read more of this post

Newly unsealed documents show Steve Jobs’ brutal response after getting a Google employee fired

Newly unsealed documents show Steve Jobs’ brutal response after getting a Google employee fired

BY MARK AMES 
ON MARCH 25, 2014

In early March, 2007, as Google was expanding fast and furiously, one of its recruiters from the “Google.com Engineering” group made a career-ending mistake: She cold-contacted an Apple engineer by email, violating the secret and illegal non-solicitation compact that her boss, Eric Schmidt, had agreed with Apple’s Steve Jobs. Read more of this post

Quicken Loans’ billion-dollar gamble pays off

Quicken Loans’ billion-dollar gamble pays off

Mar. 25, 2014   |  

Quicken and Warren Buffett are offering a Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket with Yahoo Sports for this year’s NCAA perfect bracket. / Quicken Read more of this post

The Wolves of Wall Street; Jordan Belfort was partly right: people who go into finance should not be too clever

ROBERT SKIDELSKY

Robert Skidelsky, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University and a fellow of the British Academy in history and economics, is a member of the British House of Lords. The author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, became the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords, and was eventually forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. Read more of this post

Buy a Warren Buffett Fathead for $29.99; Proceeds will go to charity

Buy a Warren Buffett Fathead for $29.99

Proceeds will go to charity

Author: By Chris Isidore

Published On: Mar 25 2014 06:23:35 AM PDT   Updated On: Mar 25 2014 07:50:38 AM PDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) – Investors have been known to pay $1 million for the chance to pick Warren Buffett’s brain over lunch. Now they can get his entire head for only $29.99. Read more of this post

Keep It Short: In writing, brevity works not only as a function of space on a page, but the time that an audience is willing to spend with you

MARCH 24, 2014, 9:00 PM  122 Comments

Keep It Short

By DANNY HEITMAN

In my first daily newspaper job some 25 years ago, I learned a few lessons about brevity that I’m still using today. Back then, among other editorial chores, I contributed to a weekly feature called “Books in Brief.” Each review could be no longer than 200 words — less than a fourth the length of a usual article. Imagine a slender column of type slightly taller than your middle finger, and you’ll get some idea of the word limit. Read more of this post

React to the Reality, Not the Image of It; Sometimes things are much better than they appear, but the truth is we don’t know what’s going on with other people’s finances

React to the Reality, Not the Image of It

By CARL RICHARDSMARCH 25, 2014

Years ago, a friend came home with a new, top-of-the-line road bike. My first thought: How can he afford that? It seemed like such a big purchase based on what I thought I knew. We lived in the same neighborhood, were close to the same age and both had young families. His life looked a lot like mine — at least I thought it did. Read more of this post

Creating Product Addicts

Creating Product Addicts

by Ian Gordon | Mar 26, 2014

Corporate attempts to boost customer loyalty, or move customers to go to great lengths to repeat purchase behaviour, can be seen as creating a form of addiction without a pejorative connotation

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