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The good that comes from a herd mentality

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herd
Creative Commons License photo credit: Eduardo Amorim

The crucial point we neglect when making decisions at work is what incredible copy-cats we all are. If a group of people or a famous person does something, even something horrible like suicide, others follow:

  • The month after Marilyn Monroe killed herself, there was a 12% rise in US suicides, mostly young blonde women.
  • When Jamie Oliver, in his TV campaign against Turkey Twizzlers, lamented that they were a children’s favourite, sales of Twizzlers rose 32%.
  • Psychological studies show that even if we know the right answer to a question, we’ll often give the wrong one if told that that’s the answer others have given.

The negative lesson from this is that scare stories about bad behaviour do more harm than good: when people are told there’s an obesity epidemic, they feel they’re not alone and put on weight. But the positive lesson is that you can herd your peers into your way of thinking.

Get enough people to buy philosophy behind lean and you can avoid the potentially inevitable disappointing results. which may result.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 4:04 pm and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    Indeed. There is a lesson inside this post for advertisers and government, and that is "be careful who you choose to sponsor your campaign". In the turkey twizzler/school meals debacle you used as an example, the government clearly over-estimated the degree of national fondness for the irritating and over-exposed twerp Jamie Oliver. Rather than being inclined to follow his lead, many of us may have vowed that we should hear him out and do just the opposite - I know I did
    Iceland on the other hand have made an astute choice in Kerry Catona. This girl is indeed a champion of those "mothers" who would rather smoke than cook. In fact I would go so far as to describe her as a patron saint of that particular group. As such those "smart mums" probably would be inclined to waddle off to Iceland, fag-in-gob, on her recommendation

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