What's New
Every week we publish new articles and add books to the library. Here's everything that landed this week.
The psychology of why customers say they want X but buy Y (stated vs revealed preferences)
The data that market research consistently produces and consistently misleads on Ask people whether they would pay more for ethically sourced products. Most say yes. Measure whether they actually do. Most don't. Ask people whether…
Decoded
Phil Barden
Decoded by Phil Barden is the most practically applicable treatment of the gap between what consumers say and what actually drives their purchase decisions. Barden spent over 25 years as a senior marketer at Unilever, Diageo, and T-Mobile before immersing himself in decision science, and the book combines that practitioner experience with a rigorous treatment of the neuroscience and behavioural economics research. His reward-minus-pain framework for understanding purchase decisions is the most directly usable available model for translating the stated-revealed preference gap into product and pricing decisions. For any entrepreneur who has discovered that what customers said they wanted in research and what they actually bought were different things, this book provides the most direct and most practically grounded explanation of why — and what to design for instead.
The psychology of why customers say they want X but buy Y (stated vs revealed preferences)
Why stated preferences are unreliable — and what actually governs purchase decision
Why diverse leadership teams make slower decisions but fewer catastrophic mistakes
Why the speed cost is real and worth paying — and when it matters most
The psychology of trust repair after broken pinky promises
Why the instinctive repair response is usually the wrong one — and what the research shows actually works
How your management style was unconsciously modelled on whoever managed you first
Why the template for how you lead was installed before you ever became a leader
The empathy gap between founders and employees — why they cannot understand each other
Why the disconnect is structural, not a communication problem
The psychology of social loafing — why people work harder alone than in groups
The Ringelmann effect and what it means for every team you build
The psychology of burnout contagion — how one exhausted leader infects an entire organisation
Why your burnout is not a private problem — and what the research shows about how fast it spreads
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