This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Increasing perimeters — Some people are big on holidays – bigger than they were before those holidays. A team at the University of Castilla-La Mancha and the University of Valladolid, Spain, sized up some first-year undergraduate nursing students, […]
“This is an important topic” – say Yunhao Dai, Raghavendra Rau, Aris Stouraitis and Weiqiang Tan [jointly of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China; Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK; and the Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong]. The important topic to which they are referring is the question of whether […]
What comparisons might be drawn, if any, between the grotesquely exaggerated, often self-destructive personality traits caused by damage to frontal brain regions and the behaviour of prominent characters in the world of business and politics who are suffering from ‘The Hubris Syndrome’? Details are provided in Chapter 1 of the 2107 book ‘The Leadership Hubris Epidemic’ […]
CEOs of high-profile (e.g. S&P 1500) corporations are sometimes tempted to shirk their duties. One quite well-tried method of shirking is to leave the office for the day and play golf instead. Thus, as an observer, if you take the position that shirking might in general hamper business performance, an extrapolated question can be asked […]
Would you say that having a big mouth might be a valid cue to leadership selection and success? A new (March 2016) study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology authored by Dr. Daniel E. Re and Professor Nicholas O. Rule of the Social Perception and Cognition Lab, University of Toronto, Canada, suggests that the […]
This week’s Make-of-This-What-You-Will Press Release comes from the University of California, Riverside. It says, in part: This dynamic – espousing good actions but then taking steps in the opposite direction – is surprisingly common among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, researchers have found in a just published paper. They found firms that engaged in prior socially […]
Business analysts struggle to find reliable ways to make any sense of the great mystery: Which firms will thrive, and which wither? This new study, perhaps as reliable as most business indicators, looks at the size of the chief executive’s handwriting: “Narcissism is a Bad Sign: CEO Signature Size, Investment, and Performance,” Charles Ham, Nicholas […]
Our eagle-eyed readers my have spotted a curiosity in the abstract for a forthcoming paper in Evolution & Human Behavior. ‘Voice pitch and the labor market success of male chief executive officers’ Specifically, the sentence : “For the median CEO of the median sample firm, an interquartile increase in voice pitch (22.1Hz) is associated with […]
A press release presents modest evidence about the worth of narcissistic Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) [here is an auto-translated version of the original German text]: The more narcissistic one CEO, the higher his willingness in his or her company to introduce new technologies – especially if these innovations are perceived by the public as “beneficial”, but […]
A new line of American-British research suggests that the shape of a chief executive officer’s head can indicate how well his firm will prosper. The shape also predicts whether the chief executive will act immorally. The research offers a mathematical tool that financial analysts can add to their professional kit bag: the chief executive officer’s facial width-to-height […]