When CEO’s Doth Praise and Equivocate Too Much: Language as Signal

The paper came out a few months ago, but NPR’s recent story reminded me of it.  Essentially, a professor and graduate student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business tried to identify the linguistic signaling used by CEO’s and CFO’s during earnings calls that could be used to reliably predict when their companies were cooking the books (PDF [...]

Color and Signaling

The idea that certain colors elicit different emotional and behavior responses in humans isn’t all that new, but a new research paper suggests that the effect is stronger than we may have thought. The research team built on the physical signal of the color red, which is displayed on the body of female chimps prior to ovulation: [...]

Applied Signaling: Pajamas and 3-year olds

Every night, about 15 minutes or so after we’ve put my 3-year old daughter to bed, we inevitably hear a knock at the door.  She’s typically knocking because she needs to go the bathroom.  She’s also knocking because she wants to scope out what we are doing, find out if she is missing anything.  One [...]

Counter-signaling in the Luxury Brand Market: Snookie edition

This was just too good to wait until I came back from vacation, combining my love of signaling and unadulterated hatred of all things Jersey Shore  (the show, not the location): Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s [...]

“I’ve been tearing money since my first Holy Communion”

Broadway Danny Rose is one of Woody Allen’s lesser known films, but I’d argue one of his best.  I was reminded of the movie the other day when I was thinking about various non-verbal displays of strength in nature. In the clip below (first 30 seconds), two men are “tearing money”–literally taking cold hard cash and [...]

Mind Your Audience(s)

Bob Sutton points to some interesting research on the impact of culture on negotiations: There is a stream of research on negotiation that shows the strategic expression of anger is effective, apparently because it is taken as a sign you are “tough” and thus leads your intimidated opponent to make concessions.  A new study by Hajo [...]

Physiological Signals

Signaling is the act of conveying meaningful information about oneself to another party.  Typically when we talk about signals we refer to intentional behavior on the part of an actor.  For example, if the leader of Country A makes a public commitment to defend Country B the leader of Country A is communicating their “type” [...]

Burning the Boats

After honeymooning without his iPhone, Noah Brier speculates that we’ve reached a point where in order to get anything done we need to ‘engineer difficulty’: as part of having a phone with a keypad (not even keyboard) I went back to T9 (you remember it, predictive type for SMS messages).  The struggle to send a simple [...]

It’s Time to Bring a Moneyball Approach to the Credit Rating Industry

Probably the least discussed aspect of the recent market crash is the role played by the credit rating agencies (CRA’s).  While some on Wall Street were hard at work creating exotic bonds and investment products that included bundles of toxic, subprime mortgage loans, the CRA’s were providing the necessary cover for these instruments to be [...]

I made it into Fast Company! (Well, sort of…)

In the re: March section of this month’s issue of Fast Company you will find a short reaction by me to one of the Heath Brother’s recent columns, “The Telltale Brown M&M“.  The Heath’s column presented a great example of how to use signals (intentional or unintentional actions) to uncover potential problems that may be [...]

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