quirky

Amidst the peak shedding season for retrospectives, I came across one of many coronavirus Top Tens. (Subscription req’d [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/12/26/10-stark-numbers-tell-story-covid/] via London’s Telegraph.) Here’s their headline-summarised economics editor 10 stark numbers that tell the story of Covid; > 1. $11.

Got any reasons to be optimistic for 2021? A recent collage in London broadsheet The Telegraph (subscription req’d [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life/reasons-optimistic-2021/] though) surely the template for many a salesteam, or even company-wide, slot at a kick-off conference as this new year begins. The idea

From the Yale Professor that brought you the finding that “moods spread like ripples through friends”, comes a coronavirus pronouncement. Recovery will come. Phew. Yet Winter sure is long, hey. The message comes from clickbait pr of ‘social epidemiologist’ Nicholas Christakis’ latest book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring

> The deal is done. pic.twitter.com/zzhvxOSeWz [https://t.co/zzhvxOSeWz] — Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) December 24, 2020 [https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1342123159181516802?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw] Christmas Eve saw surely the largest ongoing negotiation in the world complete. The Brexit deal was done. Against so many odds, and

Nudge co-author Cass Sunstein gave a twenty-minute distillation at Nudgestock 2020 of How Change Happens. He lists a quartet of factors that when in your favour, enable change to take hold. Without going into the full behavioural science, here I rather try and suggest how each one applies to a

> “This, alas, is fairly typical of the engineering mindset, which would rather spend £1,000 on technology than spend £1 on telling people how to use it.” “This”, to which Rory Sutherland refers, is a King Canute obstinacy that can be expanded to cover just about any business exec spending

Reminded this time of year by his classic three ghosts of Christmas, I’ve added to the great novelist’s original trio of his motto; > make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait, make ’em buy. Tagging on a fourth at the end. We are salespeople, after all. I

Have you and your prospect a special word? No, not that kind… One that uniquely frames all that’s going on with your current bid. From problem source, identification and manifestation. To solution construction, deployment and impact. What will be gone. What will be done. It can be an actual

Here’s a piece of Autumnal prose in the FT, triggered in part by the calamitous England public sector track and trace system, from ‘everyday economist’, Tim Harford; > “…the possibility of rapid learning. When the aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready was working on human-powered aircraft in the 1970s, his plane — the

The UK ‘nudge unit’ (founded in 2010 after the breakthrough behavioural science book of Sunstein & Thaler) assessed coronavirus transmission. Results reported towards the end of November found the infection’s version of the Pareto ratio; 60/8. Whereas Pareto back in the day may (or may not) have found Italian