Search the archives of any upscale picture library [example] and you’ll find hundreds, perhaps thousands, of photos featuring business-persons earnestly shaking hands. But does handshaking actually have any real effect at, say, a business meeting? For the first time (?) an experimental study has examined whether handshaking might (or might not) help in cooperative dealmaking […]
Tag: Business
The cost of a phone agent’s smile
Humans who answer the phones in call centers are, in many organizations, requested or even required to smile, smile, smile. A team of researchers at Goethe-University Frankfurt in Germany and the University of Denver ran an experiment to see what this forced smiling does to the forced smilers…. —so begins today’s Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on […]
The Greedy Bastard’s Guide to Business
Morris B. Holbrook, who is the William T. Dillard Professor Emeritus of Business at Columbia University Business School, New York, has had 35-plus years of experience in teaching MBAs. This experience has enabled him, possibly prompted him, to author a new paper for the Journal of Macromarketing (December 2013, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 369-385) […]
“Swallow the shrew” becomes a business slogan
Apparently, an Ig Nobel Prize-winning experiment has inspired use of a new slogan in the business world. The Transomeme blog says: At the recent 23rd First Annual IgNobel Prize ceremony, the Anthropology award went to the researchers that studied what happens when shrew bones pass through the human digestive system. I’m not kidding. Rather than building a complex system […]