“World-class customer service” is abstract. A Nordie ironing a customer’s shirt is concrete. Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. If you’ve got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren’t certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

This is the most important thing to remember about using statistics effectively. Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.

Two professors from Georgia State University, Carol Springer and Faye Borthick, decided to try something radically different. In the fall of 2000, Springer and Borthick taught a semester of accounting using, as a centerpiece, a semester-long case study. The case study followed a new business launched by two imaginary college sophomores, Kris and Sa

A journalists gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why.

Competition: “Sony will beat Bell Labs in making a transistor radio work.” Quality: “Sony will be the world’s most respected manufacturer of radios.” Innovation: “Sony will create the most advanced radios in the world.” Here’s the idea Ibuka proposed to his team: a “pocketable radio.”

It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know somethin

This year we set out to answer a question: Why do people under thirty-five, who make up 40 percent of our audience, provide only 10 percent of our donations? Our theory was that they didn’t realize how much we rely on charitable donations to do our work, so we decided to try calling them with a short overview of our business and our upcoming shows.

This same template also describes the famous World War II slogan devised by the Ad Council, a nonprofit organization that creates public-service campaigns for other nonprofits and government agencies: “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” And speaking of extreme consequences, let’s not forget the eggs sizzling in the 1980s commercial