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…if you reward the actual steps people follow, eventually results take care of themselves.

The fact that different groups of employees are exposed to wildly different data streams helps explain why people often have such different priorities and passions.

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

[People with power] don’t really know as much as they think about their own organization because people stop telling them the truth.

…people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind.

…many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.

The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person – including things you have not observed – is known as the halo effect.

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