Word: explain
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...component, what people can control, and the luck component - wind to their back or wind to their face. For companies, there are some outliers - some do better or worse for longer - but it's not a large number of companies and we don't understand why. Random processes can explain an enormous amount of what we see in the real world. This idea of a best team, you should always be circumspect about that...
...like any other group of people, are prone to make mistakes that stem from faulty approaches to decision-making. In Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, Mauboussin - also an adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School - pulls from fields such as psychology, statistics and complexity science to explain how we might do better. TIME's Barbara Kiviat spoke with...
...Dean Malmgren has. A faculty member in Northwestern University's department of chemical and biological engineering, Malmgren thinks a lot about universal laws and how they might explain human behavior, even seemingly spontaneous actions like writing an e-mail to a friend. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...current issue of Science, Malmgren and several colleagues explain that as far as human correspondence goes, when and how long you choose to sit down and e-mail your friends or family has less to do with your desire to get in touch than with a larger - and less random - system of outside factors...
...turns out that just three mechanisms combine to explain both activities. The first is our propensity to continue repeating a task once we've started: "Once you send one e-mail or write one letter, you tend to do another," says Malmgren. The second is our circadian sleep-wake cycle, which limits the available time we have to devote to letter-writing. The third is that we typically work on the same days each week, further restricting when and how long we spend getting in touch with friends. (See TIME's brain covers...