Bite-Sized Ideas

New and innovative ideas that are changing the world

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Zeigarnik Effect

What it is:

You remember tasks you have not completed better than tasks you have completed. Moreover, if you do not complete a task, you will have a desire to finish it to achieve cognitive closure.

Example:

The classic example of the Zeigarnik Effect was a waiter at a local beer garden in Berlin with impressive memory for drink and food orders. Even for large parties, he would not have to write down what drink or food was ordered, and he would deliver it correctly to each person.

However, when Bluma Zeignarik tested the waiter’s recall of what each person had ordered just a few minutes after delivery, the waiter could not remember what drinks and food had been ordered for each person. This was because the task was complete. The waiter had closure and no more reason to recall it.

Application

If you want to forget about a task, then you must have cognitive closure.

Conversely, if you want to stay focused on a task, do not complete it. This works especially well for writers. If a writer does not complete a paragraph, page, or chapter, and stops before cognitive closure, then the writer will be able to easily pick up and write the next day, because of the desire for closure.

Source: Keynote Speaker Robert Cialdini, Pre-Suasion.

Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.

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Hedgehog Concept

What it is:

A simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of the following three circles: what can you be best in the world at, what drives your economic engine, and what are you deeply passionate about? 

What it means:

In order to be great at something, you first have to understand what you can and want to be great at it and pursue that and nothing else. This conclusion comes from analyzing the three circles and determining what concept intersects. While the hedgehog concept was designed to understand how good businesses became great, the hedgehog system can also be used to analyze any system or personal goals to find what would make it great.

In business, to be great you have to find your niche, some place where you can be number one or two in the market.

Example:

In the mid-1970s, Walgreens and Eckerds were about equal in the market. However, Walgreens decided to focus on things that it could be the best at, while Eckerds did not. 

Walgreens decided that it could excel at having the best, most convenient drugstores with a high profit per customer visit. It got rid of inconvenient locations and built on locations with high customer traffic. It then provided services in the store to increase profits, such as film processing. 

Meanwhile, Eckerds spent money acquiring other drugstores and going into the home video market. Walgreens focused on what it could do best, what generated the most profit, and what it was interested in doing. Eckerds did none of these things. 

By 2000, Walgreens was still going strong, while Eckerds has ceased to exist as an independent company.

Source: Jim Collins, Good to Great.

Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.

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Juice Transferal Theory

What it is:

Hyperlinks transfer their energy from one page to the next.

What it means:

In the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), a hyperlink is a signal to the search engine (Google, Bing, etc.) that your web page is worth looking at and, therefore, will appear higher in search results. The search engine evaluates the importance of a page based on the juice of the links to it: i.e., who is linking to it and how many people are linking to it.

Example:

If you create a web page and no one links to your page, you get no juice. The search engine will think your page is not important and so it will be hard to find in search results. 

However, if you create a webpage and hundreds of people link to your page as well as trusted sources like CNN, Forbes, etc. their link juice will transfer to your web page and your page will appear higher in search results.

Source: R. L. Adams, SEO 2017: Master Search Engine Optimization

Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.

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Hacking

What it is:

The act of solving complex problems in unorthodox ways. Discovering fresh, unconventional approaches that replace prevailing wisdom.

What it means:

Hacking is an unorthodox problem-solving strategy. Though it has traditionally been associated with people who use computers to get information, hacking is about solving problems, not taking over computers. 

Example:

Raising money for research follows pretty standard procedures. People are asked to donate through the mail or the internet. Sometimes there are telethons or people asking for donations on the street.

Pete Frates came up with an unorthodox way to raise money for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) in the summer of 2014: The Ice Bucket Challenge. Instead of donating directly, people would film themselves being doused with a bucket of ice water then tag their friends in the video and challenge them to do the same thing. If the friends did not do the ice bucket challenge, they would donate money to ALS. In this manner, 115 million dollars was raised.

A truly unorthodox solution to raising money for disease research.

Source: Josh Linkner, keynote speaker, author of Hacking Innovation.

Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.

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Innovation Code

What it is:

The interactions between the four basic approaches to innovation, represented by the four different kinds of worldviews or value propositions in any business.

What it means:

You need a combination of different points of view to develop the most creative and successful solutions.

Example:

There are four different types of world views needed for any creative solution: the Artist, Engineer, Athlete, and Sage. The Artist is into wild experimentation. The Engineer makes pragmatic improvements. The Athlete drives competition. The Sage builds community.

Working together, these four types of people can guide a company from its new disruptive idea to its winning position in the marketplace by coming up with great ideas, developing them, making them competitive, and building harmony within the company.

Source: Keynote speaker Jeff Degraff and Staney Degraff,  The Innovation Code.

Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.

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Enclothed Cognition

What it is:

The systematic influence that clothes have on a wearer's psychological processes.

What it means:

What you wear determines not only how you are perceived by others, but how you perceive yourself. Furthermore, this self-perception can influence your behavior positively or negatively.

Thus, the symbolic meaning of the clothes is often transferred to the wearer’s behavior.

Example:

A white jacket. 

When called a lab coat, the symbolic meaning of being attentive and careful is transferred to the wearer’s actions.

When called a painter’s coat, the wearer does not transfer any symbolic meaning for being attentive, and would not see their attention increase. 

Takeaway:

For better outcomes, always dress for success like the stars of Shark Tank.

Source: Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky, “Enclothed cognition.”

Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.

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Parkinson’s Law

What it is:

A law for poor time management that states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

What it means:

How much time you set for a task is how much time you will take to complete it. If you set very little time for a task, you will be very efficient in what you do. If you set a long time to complete a task, your activities will also take a correspondingly long time.

Law is often cited to show that people are wasting time or not using their time efficiently. 

Example:

“An elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street.”

Source: Cyril Northcote Parkinson,  “Parkinson’s Law,” The Economist, Nov. 19, 1955.

Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.

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Pre-Suasion

What it is:

“The process of gaining agreement with a message before it is sent.”

What it means:

Pre-Suasion involves all the steps a person takes to make their listener more receptive to the message before that message is delivered. This prepares the listener to say “yes” before the message is even received.

Example:

“When interviewing for a new job in front of an evaluator or team of evaluators, after saying that you want to answer all questions as fully as possible, say one more thing: 'Before we start, I wonder if you could answer a question for me. Why did you invite me to interview today?’ As a consequence, your evaluators will hear themselves saying positive things about you and your qualifications, putting themselves in a state of mind that is favorable to your candidacy before you even begin making your case for it.”

Read more in the Power of Pre-Suasion.

Source: Dr. Robert Cialdini, business keynote speaker, author of Pre-Suasion: a Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.

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Non-Obvious Trend

What it is:

A curated observation that describes the accelerating present in a new and unique way.

What it means:

Trends can be either obvious or non-obvious. Obvious trends are things everyone notices. “Hey, we all stare at our phones too much.” 

Non-obvious trends take information from different areas (i.e., curate), finds a common theme among those disparate events, and uses that theme to describe a trend in human activity that is happening in the near present.

Example:

Deep Diving. The obvious trend for years has been shorter attention spans. The non-obvious trend is that people also like to spend more time with richer, more involving content. Wired magazine has a section of long form content called Long Reads, which is very popular. The trend is also spreading to video.

Source: Rohit Bhargava, keynote speaker, author of Non-Obvious: How to think different, curate ideas, and predict the future.

Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.

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Critical 60

What it is:

The critical sixty-day period in which employees make their decision to leave or stay in a company.  

What it means:

To stop employee turnover in a company, it’s important to change how you set expectations and incentivize employees.

How it works:

“A young man goes into sales because he sees his salesman uncle taking clients golfing and out for swanky dinners. He wants that life too. This young man spends his first few weeks on the job sitting in a cubicle making 500 cold calls a day. He’s not thrilled. So what’s the usual response? He decides this job isn’t for him and chooses to quit.” But “he might stick around for another year, biding his time for the right moment to leave” costing your company money. - Paul Moya

To change this scenario, set expectations early, incentivize employees, and give employees an easy way out.

Source: Paul Moya, keynote speaker, The Critical 60

Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.