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How do people react when they find themselves facing a fact that is too terrible to be true?… They deny it.

…data-driven emotional intelligence – the willingness to ignore conventional wisdom, gather facts in an objective, hardheaded manner, and face up to the full implications of those facts in both marketing and human terms.

Looking facts in the face is essential to avoiding denial, and before you can do so, you must ascertain what the ‘facts’ are.

No matter how brutal those facts may be, ignoring, dismissing, rationalizing, or twisting them will not make them less so.

Simply being aware that you and your company are capable of lying to yourselves and tailoring facts to fit your preconceptions is important. You can’t avoid blind spots when you drive.

A leader has to be profoundly committed to the truth to ferret out the facts that he or she must look in the face to make informed decisions. Such leaders are all too rare.

…hostile stereotyping can have dreadful consequences, but the psychological facts cannot be avoided: stereotypes, both correct and false, are how we think of categories.

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

The basic facts of human anatomy remain, more or less, but the store itself and the tastes and behaviors of the shopper continue to evolve.

The fact that a minor alteration can bring a large improvement should come as no surprise… Sometimes critical truths are discovered in this way.