Overall I was pretty disappointed in this book. I was expecting a more in-depth explanation of the interesting and off-the-wall research, but instead it it just condensed into a few sentences, with one research study per page. The sources are in the back of the book, making this little more than a conversation starter/novelty/coffee table book. I expected more from the Harvard Business Review.

If you want to see what this book essentially is, check out The Daily Stat blog. Each post is a blurb about an interesting research study. These blurbs are what make up the book. The blog also includes a link to the source study making it, in my opinion, much more dynamic than this one-dimensional book.

So the one plus? I will now be following this blog. And that might have been the whole point to this publication.

ARC courtesy of Harvard Business Review Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )

This is a very fast little collection of over 160 research findings, one to a page, and filling half a page or less each. They range from the obvious to the absurd, with many stops along the way. It seems that academic research has run out of ordinary things to study and has opened the doors to pretty much anything, especially in Canada, which jumps out as the largest single source of these “findings”.

Here are the ones I found worth remembering:

-Children cared for by grandmothers do much worse in test scores.
-Red makes auction participants bid more.
-Men with shaved heads are treated as taller and more powerful.
-Oxycontin more than doubled the number of subjects who trusted a total stranger with all their money.
-Despite the billions spent on ads, only 46% of American teens favor a car as one of their top 10 brands, down from 64% in 1998.
-The last passenger on a flight provides essentially the entire profit on that flight.
-Larger teams slow processes, develop larger forecasting errors, hamper co-ordination, increase conflicts, and diminish motivation. The ideal team size is two.
-Peppermint (the scent, not the candy) enhances attention, alertness, memory and mood.
-Mimicking a customer’s speech pattern and behavior increases sales and impression of the whole store.

And last but probably most relevant: Reading too much useless information makes people 46% less likely to think clearly. People cannot perceive the extent of the uselessness of the information they read. ( )