What's New
Every week we publish new articles and add books to the library. Here's everything that landed this week.
How social networks shape what founders believe is possible and the invisible ceiling of environmental normalisation
In 2009, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler published the most consequential set of findings in social network science that most entrepreneurs have never read. Working from the Framingham Heart Study's long-running data on tens of…
The Art of Possibility
Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander is one of the more unusual books in this area: co-authored by a conductor and a therapist, it builds its argument around the idea that the frameworks people inhabit determine what they can perceive as possible, and that expanding what is possible for an individual or an organisation requires changing the framework rather than trying harder within the existing one. The Zanders' central insight, developed through a series of interlocking practices and illustrated with cases from music, therapy, and business, is that most people are playing inside a set of rules they have absorbed from their environment without examining whether those rules are the ones they would choose. For a founder, the most immediately applicable section is their treatment of what they call "giving an A" and the framework of "contribution" as a replacement for the framework of "achievement calibrated against peers." The book is not a social network science text, and it does not engage with the Christakis and Fowler literature. Its contribution is different: it offers a phenomenological account of what the invisible ceiling actually feels like from the inside, and what it requires to notice it as a framework rather than as reality. For the entrepreneur who has absorbed the descriptive norm research and recognises its operation in their own professional context, the Zanders provide the experiential vocabulary for what the ceiling feels like and what its loosening requires.
How social networks shape what founders believe is possible and the invisible ceiling of environmental normalisation
The ambition ceiling is rarely an internal limit. Usually it belongs to the room.
The influence of audience on performance and why people work differently when they believe they are being observed
The presence of an audience does not simply add pressure to a performance. It changes what kind of…
Conformity and independence in team decision-making + when consensus reflects genuine agreement and when it reflects social pressure
Teams routinely reach decisions that no individual member privately endorses. The mechanisms behind this are not mysterious, and…
Cultural psychology and global business: How deep cultural assumptions shape negotiation communication and commercial expectation
The assumptions that feel universal to members of any given culture — about directness, about time, about what a commercial relationship actually obligates — are almost never universal…
Parasocial relationships in business and how audiences build one-sided emotional attachments to founders brands and public figures
e ethical boundary is not the parasocial relationship itself. It is the deliberate manufacture of false intimacy.
Status dynamics in professional relationships and how hierarchical perception shapes every interaction before a word is spoken
Status does not operate as a piece of information that is registered and then set aside while the…
Group identity in commercial relationships and how in-group and out-group dynamics shape trust recommendation and loyalty
The trust, generosity, and benefit of the doubt that a buyer extends to a seller is not determined primarily by the seller's track record or product quality. It…
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