Greg Krehbiel

Italian painter

6 cool ways to use a 2×2 matrix

Summary: Quadrant analysis can help organize thoughts, products, business units, and tasks. This article discusses 6 2 by 2 matrices that are helpful for business. You probably know and have used the Risk vs. Reward matrix, which creates four quadrants defined by low risk vs. high risk and low reward vs. high reward. It’s a…

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the marketing funnel

The marketing funnel vs. the customer journey map

Summary: The marketing funnel and the customer journey map are two useful mental models for understanding how your customers interact with your marketing efforts. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. You’ve seen many versions of the marketing funnel. Some of them are simply conceptual and don’t have any numbers attached to them. There might…

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gambler playing craps

The representativeness heuristic

Summary: We can fail at estimating probabilities when we allow inconsequential similarities to cloud our judgment. If you flip heads five times, are you “due” for tails? Our brains have learned to take short cuts, but these shortcuts don’t always work. When they don’t work, we call them cognitive biases. The representative heuristic is a…

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Mountain peak

The peak-end rule and event planning

Summary: Memory of an event is disproportionately affected by the peak experience and the experience at the end. People who plan events for a living should take this into account in their planning. Cold: Your memory of an event may be disproportionately affected by two things Continuing my series on the thoughts of Daniel Kahneman…

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car salesman

Anchoring bias and how to avoid it

Summary: Anchoring bias is a cognitive bias that makes us latch on to the first bit of data we hear. This post discusses eight ways to combat this bias. Daniel Kahneman might be best known for his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” which I haven’t read, but I’ve read and heard a lot about Kahneman’s…

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Holmes and watson podcast

9 ways to create a unique editorial style for your articles or podcasts

Summary: To make your content stand out in a crowded field, consider these nine concepts: voice, focus, frameworks, recurring segments, vocabulary, message, favorites, characters, and skits. Publishers spend a lot of time and money developing their own brand image, which can include typography, colors, logos, and stylized art. Think of the dot-matrix images in The…

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pretty teacher with a book

Book summaries, the revolt of the left hemisphere, and artificial intelligence

Summary: AI summaries of books and articles present a copyright threat to publishers, but a wider movement towards summaries and bullet points might have more significance for culture and for understanding. Bo Sacks recently distributed an article titled, “A tech sector dedicated to boiling things down has raised temperatures in some quarters of the publishing…

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