Supposedly, the Ivory Tower has nothing to teach business people, but here are three lessons business could learn by looking a bit more closely.

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You’ve all seen the bumper sticker: “If it ain’t grown, it’s mined.” I realized some years ago that this is a powerful metaphor for many things in life and I started to divide people into farmers and miners. I came to this realization when I watched how our neighbor, who owns 23 vacation rentals, maintained [...]

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You want to buy a new car, take a new job, volunteer at the food bank — how can you ensure that you’re making the right decision?

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There’s no stupider way to hitchhike than to stand by the side of the road with your thumb out hoping someone will stop. And yet do you see people do it any other way? Which way are you living your life?

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It’s hard to make good decisions, but here are three quick jedi mind tricks to avoid a lot of bad decisions:forget sunk costs, use absolute numbers rather than proportions, and be aware of confirmation bias.

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If you should ever happen across a structure on fire, there are a few simple things you can do that will be a huge help to firefighters and reduce the chance that the fire will spread to surrounding buildings. This is all pretty obvious advice once someone tells you, but if I hadn’t gone through this training with the fire department, I would not have had a clue how to make the right decisions in a structure fire crisis.

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Friends may do as they may, but people who are trying to market via Twitter often seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what exactly they’re doing and hurt their reputation rather than enhance it. Here are some thoughts on the different uses of Twitter.

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The most foolish things I’ve done in my life have been for neither love nor money, but simply for free ice cream. One spring, when I was about ten years old, in return for an ice cream cone, I swam out to the ice in Lake Champlain, only about 25 feet, but in water cold [...]

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You weren’t planning to buy the premium edition, but somehow that’s what you came home with. How did they get you do to do that? Easy. The Contrast Principle

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If you have to make a snap decision to save your life, that’s one thing, but the hoopla around Malcom Gladwell’s book Blink got me thinking of the times when I’ve been told that you can’t always trust logic. Well, never trust someone who tells you that.

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