Bit Pickles & Fuzzy Olives

In The Million Dollar Pickle (retitled after a reader suggested the original title When Stories Don’t Sell wasn’t that good), I retold a story about how a single bad customer service experience turned a business author and speaker into a negative PR machine for a local supermarket. What sparked that post was my OWN version [...]

Continue Reading...

Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)

The imperfection of our human brains has been a frequent topic of books lately, most notably Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. Mistakes were made goes into considerable depth on one key failing, cognitive dissonance. The authors call cognitive dissonance the “engine of self-justification” and attribute many examples of irrational behavior to our attempts to resolve it.

Continue Reading...

The Dark Side of Anecdotes

The power of anecdotes to persuade (see Why Stories Sell and Your Brain on Stories) is established, but there’s a dark side to that power. Quite simply, an effective story can take over our brains to the point where we disregard more valid information: reliable statistics, the opinions of true experts, and so on.

Continue Reading...