I did that looking for a specific post from awhile back and was pleasantly surprised by re-reading all of the results, so I thought others might find it interesting.

I believe the post I was looking for was the first one, but I feel I touched on this concept a long time before that, but I haven’t found that post yet.

I detest those types of headlines and stories.

There are no such thrones. Which one has more sales is not all that meaningful, at least not any newsworthy sense.

I guess the easy way to say this, is that Amazon appears to be entering Day 2.

Search for Amazon Day 1 and Day 2 on this blog if you want to know more about what that means.

It’s odd how many folks in professions that seemingly require objectivity are super biased and seem wholly unaware of it.

My assumption that those professions require objectivity is obviously flawed, because they never seem to pay a professional price for their biases.

Scientists and journalists come to mind.

I see it in less publicly visible professions, too. In my experience, market researchers have super biases. And these folks know bias. They carefully construct surveys to avoid these biases.

But, then they turn around and let their super biases influence their interpretations of their research data. Those biases lead to spurious conclusions that cause business leaders to bark up the wrong trees with business initiatives.

When those business initiatives fail, it doesn’t occur to the managers to push the market researchers on whether their conclusions are valid. Rather, they have them do more market research and produce more spurious conclusions heavily influenced by their bias.

Eventually, the managers get fired because all of their initiatives fail to move the needle. The market researchers keep their jobs and tell the next set of managers spurious conclusions based on their biased interpretations. Rinse and repeat.

Tell folks who should be interested about a success that you had that you had that success.

Then see what happens.

Are they interested and want to learn more about it?

Or do they pretend that they didn’t even hear you?

For years, I went around telling folks about a big success I had in my career. Nobody asked any questions. I thought that was strange.

That would make a great t-shirt.

I noticed something subtle in a business. It hurt way too much to be wrong and there was often way too much riding on being right.

That is a sign of a culture that needs some work.

Why does it hurt so much to be wrong? Because the culture doesn’t know how to try things in low stakes ways to find out.

Rather, they make big bets. To convince bosses to make a big bet, you need a good sales pitch. A good sales pitch promises something great when you don’t know if that will happen.

When bosses make big bets, they put the company’s resources and their own egos on the line.

If it turns out that the great things promised don’t happen, it hurts. It wastes a lot of company resources and bruises a few egos and reputations.

When I find myself in situations where there is so much riding on being right, I think about what’s causing that and how can I change it?