The greatest communicators of all time, says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing what is: here’s the status quo....
Rice professor Erik Dane finds that the more expertise and experience people gain, the more entrenched they become in a particular way of viewing the world. He points to studies showing that expert br...
Research suggests that there are two fundamental paths to influence: dominance and prestige. When we establish dominance, we gain influence because others see us as strong, powerful, and authoritative...
People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. Mark Twain
In roles as leaders and mentors, givers resist the temptation to search for talent first. By recognizing that anyone can be a bloomer, givers focus their attention on motivation. The
If you want to engage your audience, if you really want to grab their attention, you have to know the world they live in, the music they listen to, the movies they watch,
Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.
Givers tend to use more powerless speech, talking with tentative markers like these: • Hesitations: well, um, uh, you know • Hedges: kinda, sorta, maybe, probably, I think • Disclaimers: this may be a...
For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck’s top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they h...
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.1 Scott Adams
Conceptual innovators tend to generate original ideas early but risk copying themselves. The experimental approach takes longer, but proves more renewable: instead of reproducing our past ideas, exper...
By giving away credit, Meyer compromised his visibility. For a long time, George’s towering contribution to what some see as the most important TV show of the period was not as well known as it should...
At its core, comedy is an act of rebellion. Evidence shows that compared to the norms in the population, comedians tend to be more original and rebellious—and the higher they score on these dimensions...
Anthony and Stanton viewed Stone’s support of voting rights for black men as a betrayal of the women’s cause. They reneged on their commitment to a joint organization and announced the formation of th...
All it took was having them spend their initial six minutes a little differently: instead of adopting a managerial mindset for evaluating ideas, they got into a creative mindset by generating ideas th...
Across cultures, there’s a rich body of evidence showing that people continue to hold strong gender-role stereotypes, expecting men to be assertive and women to be communal. When women speak up, they...
Physicist Max Planck once observed, A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.
Givers always score high on other-interest, but they vary in self-interest. There are two types of givers, and they have dramatically different success rates. Selfless givers are people with high othe...
Analysts were more likely to maintain their star performance if they worked with high-quality colleagues in their teams and departments. The star analysts relied on knowledgeable colleagues for inform...