Browsing through the McKinsey Quarterly recently I came across this article exhorting businesses to consider the benefits of applying knowledge in the field of behavioral science to areas such as marketing, operations, and customer service. The advice can be simple, even while the research itself is rigorous and complex. For example, in the McK Q article the advice to companies seeking to manage customer interactions in ways that consider this research are the following five bullet points:
1. Get bad experiences over with early (rip-it-off like a band-aid)
2. Break up pleasure and combine pain (mix up the rewards and costs of interacting)
3. Finish the interaction strongly (leave them wanting more)
4. Give customers choice (give them control)
5. Let customers stick to their habits (don't keep changing things up)
Nothing wrong with this at all. What strikes me is that this is exactly the sort of knowledge that b-schools (and e-schools) need to be passing on to their graduates.
The recent popularity of books such as Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" Malcolm Gladwell's Blink/Tipping Point/Outliers, Levitt & Dubner's Freakonomics/Super Freakonomics and numerous others, together indicate an appetite for behavioral research in its various guises. The scientific knowledge that forms the foundation for these books represents real Rosetta-stone material for unlocking how people think, decide, and act. Now those are tools that all managers should have in their tool boxes.
You can learn about teamwork anywhere. You can learn about leadership anywhere (perhaps anywhere BUT the classroom). Where better than the universities, those places that are conducting this kind of basic research, can you learn about behavioral science findings and how to apply them?
