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06/13/2008 03:13 PM
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Why Lemmings Drown Themselves and Companies Go Bankrupt
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Everyone knows that overpopulation turns lemmings toward the sea to correct the problem. That’s kind of what happens in stock markes from time to time. When irrational exuberance lifts stocks to unsustainable levels, investors destroy value by dumping stocks so fast that supply far outpaces demand and prices precipitously plummet. Too much of anything triggers correction in due course. It must be a law of nature. No one would attribute...
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06/12/2008 09:20 AM
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We Know Less about Our Motivations than Consumer Research Commonly Supposes
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We’ve seen some strange ideas about the sources of human behavior coming out in the mainstream press over the past few years. More and more it seems, our hallowed concepts of volition and self-awareness are appearing to be as much an illusion as the apparent flatness of Mother Earth. Gary Klein’s provocative Sources of Power destroyed the Defense Department’s illusion that people under fire in the battlefield reason through their...
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05/14/2008 10:18 AM
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Say It Ain't So, Dove
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I am stunned. I feel cheated. I am mad. Damn mad! For several years I have been touting Dove’s Real Beauty campaign as a high-minded example of authenticity in consumer marketing. Imagine my dismay, then, when I discovered in the May 12 issue of The New Yorker that the real beauties in Dove’s Real Beauty campaign are not real. The success of the Real Beauty campaign still validates my original...
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05/05/2008 10:51 AM
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The Silent Generation Revisited
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Reader Anita Landis of the GlynnDevins ad agency in Overland Park, Kansas sent me the URL to an article on the Silent Generation that ran in the June 29, 1970 issue of Time. I found the article by Time Associate Editor Gerald Clarke fascinating from several perspectives. First, it was written by a member of the Silent Generation who had bought into the idea that it was every bit as...
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04/30/2008 11:04 AM
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On Sloppy Scholarship and the Silent Generation
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Sloppy scholarship sometimes makes me mad. I especially get upset when it shows up in a widely esteemed newspaper like the New York Times. Why? Because many people in important positions will take on faith claims made in the great gray lady of U.S. journalism irrespective of their accuracy or lack thereof. Last Sunday’s editorial section carried such piece. It was titled, “When the Time Make the Man." In it,...
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