“Yes, and … “That two-word phrase can deepen your relationships and make you better at sales. That’s the word from Isaac Rodriguez, CEO of Provident Loan, and an amateur improv performer. He learned “yes, and … ” as an improv technique for continuing or escalating a scene, but then discovered it was very effective in the business world as well. I’d never really thought about “yes, and … ” before he recommended it but now that I have, I see how it’s a surprisingly powerful tool. Here’s why:
Author: lmehit
4 Neuroscience Secrets to Remain Calm Under Pressure | Inc.com
Great leaders always seem to remain calm during situations that make mere mortals fall to pieces. Conventional wisdom says that the ability to remain calm is a character trait that most of us lack.
Neuroscience, however, has recently revealed that remaining calm under pressure is not an inborn trait, but a skill that anybody can learn.
Here’s how it’s done:
1. Understand the biochemistry.The opposite of remaining calm is the state of “fight or flight,” a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival.
Nordstrom’s Journey To Connect Instagram Images To Sales ROI|adexchanger.com
Despite having close to a half million Instagram followers, upscale retailer Nordstrom knows that “likes” and “follows” are great for growing community and measuring engagement or affinity, but these actions don’t necessarily translate into hard business metrics. Retailers want to know if that showroom-grade snapshot on social actually sold a tube of lipstick.
“What we’ve primarily done on Instagram is respond to customer questions,” said Bryan Galipeau, director of social media and display at Nordstrom. “Every photo we would post, we would get a number of questions back like, ‘Is that item still available?’ and ‘What does it cost?’”
Because Instagram content essentially lives in its own native environment, “it’s pretty difficult for our customers to make the jump from seeing a picture in the feed and learning more about the item on our site or in our stores,” he added. “The way the platform is set up, there are no links on Instagram and no easy way out to our website.”
A “Yelp For Cops” To Rate The Police–And It Was Made By High School Students | Fast Company
Nine days after unarmed Michael Brown was shot by a police officer, and after days of police aiming tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, pepper balls, and beanbag rounds at protesters, a group of young students from Georgia released one response to the problem of police abuse: A new app that that lets citizens rate any interaction with a cop.
“We’ve been hearing a lot about the scary, negative issues occurring in the media, for example, most recently, the Michael Brown case,” says 16-year-old Ima Christian, who built the app along with siblings Caleb, 14, and Asha, 15, with help from Joshua, age 10.
Predictive Analytics: Potential Cure | WIRED
The way we hire and manage employees in America is fundamentally broken. Not only are unemployment rates still high in most cities, but approximately 32 percent of the current unemployed population has been unemployed for seven months or longer. Many people believe these long term unemployed workers no longer fit in today’s workplace, but they are wrong.
To combat this issue the White House just unveiled new legislation for getting America back to work with the recent signing of the Workforce Innovation and Employment Act. Key to this initiative is taking action against the human biases and “skills gap” separating many unemployed workers from the companies that could hire them. As part of the President’s initiative, 300 corporations have pledged to change hiring practices that discriminate against the long term unemployed, enabling qualified individuals to get back to work.
MIT and Marriott – Test A Matchmaking Table | WIRED
“Say you like to jog in the morning and you’re near Central Park, but you don’t want to run alone because you’re in a new city,” says Paul Cahill, SVP of brand management at Marriott Hotels. “How do we curate those experiences and connect people with like interests?”
Cahill’s quandary is a unique one in the hospitality industry. Other popular hotels, like the Ace, or apartments booked through Airbnb, are designed to create organic social connections—the Ace through its leather couch-filled lobbies and the Airbnb through its hosts. But 80 percent of Marriott’s guests are there for business, and don’t have the luxury of fast-friending in the lobby, or pouring over guidebooks to sleuth out the best craft beer bar in the neighborhood.
Cahill took the problem to MIT’s Mobile Experience Lab.
To Avoid Checking Emails On Vacation: Auto-Delete Them | Fast Company
You’re on summer vacation at the beach. What are the chances that you pull out your phone to check your work email? No matter how much we might say we recognize the value of unplugging, most of us aren’t very good at actually doing it. One study found that as many as 83% of employees check email on vacation.
If we can’t stem our email addiction by ourselves, maybe the answer is to make it automatic. At Daimler’s headquarters in Germany, employees have the option to turn on a “Mail on Holiday” function on their email: Every time an email comes in while the employee is away, it’s automatically deleted.
Move Over, Cookie. Here Comes The Ad ID | adexchanger.com
Some of the largest companies on the Internet are working on ad IDs and complex identity-management solutions, both of which aim to serve as alternatives or replacements for the third-party cookie.
This is because the third-party cookie and associated ecosystem are facing major challenges. First, third-party cookies can be deleted by users, are cleared by security software programs on average every seven days and are blocked completely by many browsers and devices.
How to Make Small Talk Way More Fun | Inc.com
Whether you’re waiting to pick up your kid after soccer, killing time until that last meeting participant shows up, or kicking off a job interview, small talk is a ubiquitous feature of modern life, but it’s not necessarily one most of us enjoy very much.
Even as you smile through another banal chat about the weather “Sure is hot!”, you’re probably silently thinking about the lameness of the exchange while frantically searching for the next bland question to fill the silence. Is this just the unalterable nature of small talk or is there a better way?
Swedish McDonald’s Promotion Lets Customers Pay for Burgers with Recycled Cans | Adweek
How do you get young people to care about recycling?
Free burgers couldn’t hurt.DDB Stockholm and McDonald’s collaborated on a campaign in Sweden which allows customers to pay for hamburgers, cheeseburgers and even Big Macs with recycled cans. Billboards placed around Stockholm announce the campaign with a roll of plastic bags that can be used to collect cans for recycling. Each bag also explains the custom pricing for the promotion: 10 cans nets you a hamburger or cheeseburger, while 40 will get you a Big Mac. The billboards are mostly centered around parks or summer festival areas, where, as DDB Stockholm puts it, “you’ll find a lot of young people with empty drink cans and empty wallets.”
Dispatches From The Front 