Five thought-provoking posts in six days:

What Is Management About: “Business is much more about being organized and managing people than it is about ideas. Past a certain scale, ideas don’t seem to matter much … Much of the time spent discussing `ideas’ in a business context is actually time spent slowly maneuvering large groups of managers into a compatible mind-space so that they can work together effectively.” (more)

Why Little Airline Plain Talk: Half of [employees] dislike or sometimes even despise their customers and that their natural speech patterns, given their true feelings, would come across negatively. … They face lots of customers, with varying and often unreasonable expectations, and they have few resources to buy them off with. (more)

Most Story Protagonists Kidless: “At least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced.” … The decline of the heroic ideal in literature, and the decline of the journey of adventure, seem to be stronger forces in predicting fictional family size. (more)

Why Corporate BS Talk: Since it is hard to oppose fluffy generalities in any very specific way, a common strategy is to stack everyone’s opinion or points into an incoherent whole. Disagreement is then less likely to become a focal point within the corporation and warring coalitions are less likely to form. … Rule of thumb: when you see the demoralizing, start with the premise that it is being done for morale. (more)

Happiness As Bad Signal: “Happiness” to me sounds boring, as if the person has a limited imagination when it comes to wants and an inability to be frustrated by the difficulty of creating new peak experiences. … Viewed as a signaling problem, “happiness” fails when it comes to credibly demonstrating the possession of some extreme quality or another. The busier people are, and the higher wages are, the more important it should be to signal extreme qualities to command the attention of interesting others. (more)

Don’t stop now Tyler!