What is the origin of focus groups? To address a drop in sales of cake mixes in the mid-fifties, Betty Crocker, a subsidiary of General Mills, hired Ernest Dichter, Viennese …

Michael Norton, in The Ritual Effect, explains that rituals or idiosyncratic behavior is what makes us who we are. Habit and ritual are different. Habit is automation. Ritual is animation. …

Michael Norton, michaelnorton.com, Harvard Business School Harold M. Brierley Business Administration Professor, and his Harvard colleagues and others around the world interviewed anthropologists, economists, neuroscientists, and psychologists to understand rituals. …

What do parents tell their children?  “You didn’t come with an owner’s manual.” Why not? One manual for every child is impossible. We learn only through direct personal experience. Our …