A close friend of mine is pregnant and travels frequently for work. She always refuses the full-body scanners and opts for a pat-down instead. She jokes that she’s been felt up in almost every airport in the US. Every time she refuses the full-body scan, the workers insist that it is completely safe. Yeah, that’s what they said about the x-ray machine too.
We know a lot less than we think we know. One mind-boggling example of this is baby formula. In his book “In Defense of Food”, Michael Pollen traces …

How could I not have known about something so interesting? Gartner, the research company, has a set of offerings they call Hype Cycles. You pull up an industry on their website and select the chart you want to see. Unfortunately, you need to be a paying Gartner customer to see them. This is where it helps to work for a large company that has an account with Gartner.
Here’s Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies that I found by searching Bing Images for “Gartner hype cycle”. It’s fascinating to look …

“Remember that innovation stalls with the status quo. Celebrate your team members’ differences. Many years ago one of the most brilliant engineers at Atari was, well, eccentric. He lost his apartment, so he literally moved into the office, taking residence in a makeshift loft that fellow team members built for him. Incredibly, the only entrance was through a conference room. He’d crank away all night, and you’d arrive in the morning to find all the amazing things he’d accomplished. But you couldn’t talk to him till the afternoon when he …

Well-prepared speakers do not memorize answers to hundreds of potential questions. Instead, they prepare answers to categories of questions. The way a question is phrased is secondary. Think about it this way: your goal is to launch a minipresentation within a presentation.
You can use the bucket method to reframe the question in your favor. Let’s assume that your company’s product is more expensive than a similar offering by one of your competitors. Let’s also assume that there is a good reason behind the higher price. The way the question is …

Listeners like lists. But how many points should you include in the list?
Three is the magic number.
Comedians know that three is funnier than two. Writers know that three is more dramatic than four. Jobs knows that three is more persuasive than five. Every great movie, book, play, or presentation has a three-act structure. There were three musketeers, not five. Goldilocks encountered three bears, not four. There were three stooges, not two. Legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi told his players there were three important things in life: family, religion, and the …