Potential might matter more than achievement, via research from Zakary Tormala at Stanford

As a society, we broadly seem to value the young and virile — every year that you add is an opportunity for jokes about adding said years, and we take care (well, often) of the very old as if they… Continue Reading →

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The I-95 corridor, economy-wise, is basically Germany (oh, and the United States is now essentially 12 mega-regions)

Peter Hamby, from CNN, was one of my college roommates; we were talking a while back and he told me that sometimes, as he travels around America on political stories, he thinks it’s just a mix of large cities and… Continue Reading →

Cue the research from Nick Epley and Ayelet Gneezy: When you over-deliver on a promise/claim, no one really cares that much

Because of observations they initially made about Amazon, two researchers — Ayelet Gneezy at UC-San Diego and Nicholas Epley at University of Chicago — launched a study about reaction to promises and claims by others. It turns out no one really… Continue Reading →

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Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, should be the wave of the future. The problem? Often, employees are treated like children.

There’s a long article on Slate from over the weekend — I think it’s one of their most popular and most shared, all that — about ROWE, or Results-Only Work Environment. Here’s the article. I’ve written about this kind of stuff a ton… Continue Reading →

Estonia is a small country in northern Europe that has about as many people as Hawaii; it became a global leader in technology, though. Here’s the valuable lesson for the world.

Estonia, a former Soviet republic, is now often considered one of the leading digital centers of the world (some call it “E-Stonia” as a result). People vote online, people do their tax returns in moments via mobile (and get their… Continue Reading →

DC, Colorado, Ohio, Minnesota and Maryland have the most Chipotle restaurants per capita. Something about that seems odd.

I unabashedly love Chipotle, despite the fact (EDIT: because of the fact…) that I’m a white male raised middle-class in a major urban center. They have good food, it seems fresh, it comes pretty quickly, and they have cool marketing campaigns. Investors… Continue Reading →

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What if one weekly meeting took up 300,000 hours of manpower in a year? That’s the entire year of 34 people’s lives. But this stuff happens.

Take a deep breath and say it with me: not everything needs to be a meeting. Pause, and now say it loud and say it proud: some things can be an e-mail, a quick talk in the hallway, or a trip to… Continue Reading →

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What millennials seem to want out of cities: walkability, public transportation, good schools and parks (car is not necessary)

Admittedly, the “millennials vs. Boomers” topic is already a little old — and this is before millennials even start assuming the majority of roles in the workforce (right now, many of them are still in some form of school, or… Continue Reading →