In difficult times we see a lot of advice about what to do, and a lot of that involves setting goals to do whatever it is the author is advising. While goals can be inspiring and useful for managing the tactical day-to-day, they have a dark side too. A dark side we spend too little time talking about.

As crafters of even the most successful and sophisticated sales compensation plans can attest, even the most carefully thought out goals carry hidden imbalances and unintended consequences. Or as the authors of Goals Gone Wild, a recently-published Harvard Working Paper, put it, common dark side effects include, “a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation.”

Like anything that gets out of balance, it’s common sense. Hammers work well on nails, but they’re not so great with screws, glue and more, and not everything can be fixed with nail. Implement with caution.

Feeling like you need a little more creativity? Imagination? Want to inspire more positive and proactive suggestions? Or just hang on to your party guests a little longer? Then blue is for you according to researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Michigan.

On the other hand, if you want to be perceived as more attractive, to increase your edge in a close competition, or boost your accuracy in proofreading that document you’re about to post, you’re better off seeing red.

Our associations with color are real. Restaurants, retailers and even your local police station’s drunk tank often take advantage of the moods and mind sets they can provoke. If you want to provoke a little of your own color on life, read about the latest research from Pam Belluck in the NY Times.  

I grew up in a household without caffeine, and I feel a little sense of guilt each morning as I wrap my hands around that warm cup of coffee and breathe in the aroma that seems to wake up my brain with its mere scent. I was taught that caffeine is bad for your brain, bad for performance, just plain bad for you. So imagine my delight as evidence continually emerges that coffee is actually good for you. 

This latest study, tracking more than a thousand people over 21 years, showed a 65% decrease in the risk of dementia and Alzheimers in those drinking three to five cups of coffee a day. (There was a decreased risk in those drinking five or more cups as well, but there weren’t enough of them for those results to be statistically significant; maybe they were too wired to sit still for the study’s paperwork.) 

This is correlative, not causitive. So it could be that knowing you need coffee is a sign that you are dementia-free. Who knows?

Whatever the source of these results, I salute the Danish and Swedish researchers for performing this great service for coffee-lovers. To learn more about how your morning cup is saving your sanity for use in future years, check out the New York Times (free registration may be required).

I am attracted to science because of its paradoxes, such as the necessity for focus and careful consideration of cause versus correlation that’s harbored inside of those fully engaged imaginations that bubble with the curiosity and inspiration to make quantum leaps.

In the January 23, 2009 Science, a true quantum leap was reported – a leap to quantum computing.

It turns out there are these things called qubits that are about as indecisive as me trying to choose between the pants that make me look lumpy and the ones that make me look fat: ask me about one, and it’s destroyed as an option — leaving me clinging to the only remaining choice — until you ask me about that too. Qubits are the same way. They hold multiple states at the same time; they are quantum. But ask them to make a choice? It destroys them.

Knowing more about shopping than I do, or at least decision-making while shopping, these ingenious scientists used this property to induce a qubit and a couple of atoms into true quantum computing. First they zapped an atom, exciting one of its electrons into one of these understandably undecided states. (After all, how do you feel when someone zaps you with microwaves for no known reason? ) Then they used lasers to entangle this atom with another, creating an entangled pair of quantum identities. In other words, one of these atoms is just like the other…causing the qubit to be shared between the two atoms.

So what happens next? The scientists simply teleport. Seriously. They teleport the qubit from the first atom to the second.

I watched The Fly starring Vincent Price when I was a child, and I would not recommend trying this teleportation thing at home. Anyhow, once the entanglement ends, you have two atoms with the same qubit. Ask the qubit with the first atom to decide, and voila, it’s destroyed. You’re left with a teleported qubit hanging out with the other atom.

So why all the excitement? This is a crucial baby step in super-fast quantum computing. It’s a bit slow, cumbersome and expensive at the moment, but just wait. You thought your Centrino 2 chip and dual-core processors were fast? Wait until your computer can hold information in multiple states — and selectively teleport it.

Now, if only I could get as inspired about one of those pairs of pants.

Statement: You have to give up on some things that you start.

Answer: Agree? Strongly agree? Strongly disagree? 

If you want to work at Finish Line, Best Buy, CVS or any number of more than 100 other retailers, you’ll strongly disagree.

Many applicants who do not disagree with that statement, however, have shown an impressive dedication to persisting until they “pass” this crucial interivew pre-test, the Wall Street Journal revealed in one of today’s cover stories.

Mark Scott applied for a job at Circuit City, and was declined for an interview. He scored as disqualifyingly red on Kronos’ Unicru test. When a friend offered to show him how to cheat, so he could “pass” the personality test, he took him up on it. He landed the next interview and job with another Unicru-devoted retailer, Blockbuster, immediately.

The Unicru test just, ”weeds out people who are honest and selects those who lie,” Mr. Scott tells us. With “pass” rates rising to 50% at some retailers, that sounds like a plausible conclusion. Particularly given the fact that many applicants take the retailer’s online test multiple times until they end up with just the right personality. Cheating, or a new online form of Multiple Personality Disorder?

If you’re interested in changing your personality, keys exist online, including at the Facebook group, Workers and Employers Against Unicru.

Amusing as it is to think about the concept of cheating on a personality test, for me whether a business chooses to implement these tests is itself a greater test of the management team’s own abilities and personality. Is it truly useful for employers to screen out applicants with this particular type of automation? And when applicants ”cheat” by misrepresenting their personality, who wins, and who loses? 

Much of my business philosophy is driven by Pareto’s Law, but rather than 80/20, I think it’s usually more like 90/10. Even more so in start-ups. When employers use these tests as an automated screen, they’re focusing on the wrong side of that equation. They’re automating the wrong piece of the business.

First there is the danger of group think and companies filled with the prototypical yes-man. Second, having worked in retail and shopped with others for everything from clothes to data center servers, I can provide first-hand testimony that no single personality is the “best” kind of sales person. Or to think about it in a larger sense, the contining evolvement of living things on our earth provides a vivid example of the value of diversity. Sameness does not inspire cross-pollination and creative breakthroughs, or generate the spark that inspires a leap in your thinking.  

Some retailers claim these tests save them thousands of hours each year screening potential employees. Others, like Whole Foods, say they might help find a well-matched personality, but that doesn’t correlate to job competence. (Whole Foods abandoned the Unicru test.) So what is an employer to do?

Kronos’ test developers, psychologists and other employees with a paycheck depending upon the company’s survival, say (a) the test is valid, (b) nobody really has a key, and (c) it’s not really possible to cheat. And Mark Scott went from red at Circuit City to green practically overnight to land at his new employer Blockbuster. So I wonder, with all of the arguments for and against, and all this non-existent cheating, in the end are these employers actually getting some of the more ingenious, creative and dedicated workers after all? 

Perhaps one of Unicru’s own statements sums it up best for the employers who rely so heavily upon the test.

Statement: Any trouble you have is your own fault.

Answer: Strongly Agree

It seems there is no better time for fun than the New Year. So in the spirit of the New Year, tickle your brain by trying one of the following free games for hours of amusement that will also grow your cognitive skills. These references are through the courtesy of Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily. If you get caught, you can go there to get more details on how you’re actually working to grow your brain power.  And whether you get caught or not, have yourself a new year full of joy and discovery. 

Str8ts. If you like Sodoku but are getting a bit too good at it, you’ll probably find yourself addicted to the daily Str8ts puzzle.

Crosswords. If you don’t want to sign up for the NY Times daily puzzle, try the Washington Post’s.

Assembler. A visuo-spatial puzzler. If you don’t like this, studies show that playing video games that rely on spatial perception will also do the trick, no matter your age or gender.

Tangrams. How about some good old-fashioned tangrams to hone those spatial skills?

Dual-N-Back. If you want to grow your IQ, try this one. Verbal, auditory, spatial, visual…it will keep your brain busy. If you have any doubters, you can refer them to this site for proof.

Numbrosia. Fun, difficult and highly addictive.

Or try a happy home for logic puzzles here. 

And on that note, have very happy and healthy new year.

As the new year approaches, I find myself attempting to unweave the many factors that have contributed to the economic crisis we’re in, and I wonder how James Surowiecki is feeling now about the theories he posited in his 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds. From the Tulip Craze to the Great Depression, the dot-com bust to the current recession, why do we all seem to so blindly follow the Wisdom of Crowds?

Of course I had my own opinion, but then along came Ashley Ward and her four co-authors with a biological explanation (in Current Biology of course) reminding me that this tendency to behave like lemmings isn’t uniquely human or inspired solely by greed. We have deeply-ingrained instincts that often actually protect and save us from harm. Unfortunately if we’re blindly following these instincts, forgetting to stay alert on decisions that can be devastating if wrong, our choices can backfire dangerously.

The oversimplified summary is that when we aren’t sure of what to do, we often follow the crowd. John Medina talks about the efficiency of this phenomena as well in one of my favorite books, his Brain Rules. After all, if everyone is doing it, it must be the better choice. Right?

This rule persists at an almost instictual level because much of the time it works. In this most recent study, the researchers looked at stickleback fish to see whether they used the wisdom of crowds to choose their leaders, and if so, whether the shortcut actually improved the quality of their decisions.

It did, usually. The larger the school of fish, the better it was at choosing its leader. (See Science News article here – subscription may be required.) Schools could even make subtle distinctions between leaders.

But these schools also had their own versions of undocumented loans, securitized mortgages and Bernie Madoffs. 

In the beginning, the fish in the experiments began by choosing one of two leaders. Occassionally a fish would wander off in support of the lesser leader, but typically the vast majority of the school formed behind the stronger choice. As schools grew in size, fish began to simply follow the leader with the most followers.

And there’s the rub. Most of the time following the wisdom of the crowd worked. But when those making the initial choices made errors or overlooked information, most of the fish still followed like, well, lemmings.

In the case of this recent economic crisis, the global financial world followed in much the same way. The market followed instincts evolved for efficient decision making, but many followed the crowd blindly. On decisions crucial to their financial future they ignored warnings that the market was perhaps again irrationally exuberant, and their choice was likely to backfire dangerously. 

In the coming year, may you be enriched by the wisdom of crowds. But when you smell something fishy, may you also be blessed with an appropriate dose of skepticism.

This time of year lists are popular, and Business Pundit recently came out with their list of the year’s best business blogs. In this blog we usually cover topics we think will help you and your business be more successful, but we often approach our subjects from the perspective of what scientific research reveals about our hidden biases, our tried-and-true theories or some new or unique perspectives.

For those times when you’re looking for some of the better general-purpose business blogs, this list is a good place to start. And if you find a blog you really like, don’t forget to look for more new favorites and inspirations on that writer’s blog roll.   

In tough times we often need to learn how to do things better, or to do them at all. Twenty years ago that often meant finding a mentor, wading through some serious research or investing in costly resources. Today we all have many tutors available to show us how to do things – for free. And they’re hidden right in front of us. 

A YouTube search on “How To Newsletter” yields 2,710 results, many of them rated. Yet until I read this story about a university student using YouTube videos to master trigonometry and graphing, I never would have thought to look. So whether mastering trignometry, creme fraiche or process design, if you’re looking for a little help, try looking right in front of you.

Wikipedia: “Design thinking is a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result.”

Uh, how is this new? But even Tom Peters is jumping on the band wagon of design thinking being some hot new thing. Wassup?

On this one, I’m with Brian Ling. “Design thinking” is just thinking. It’s meant to imply the kind of multi-disciplinary thinking that great designers employ to solve the problems of both form and function with beautiful simplicity. But it’s still just thinking.

In Harvard’s Working Knowledge last June, Jim Heskett asked why managers don’t think deeply any more. If calling it “design thinking” gets people to really think again, I’m OK with it. Just as long as it doesn’t turn into another short-lived fad.