The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.

Breaking tasks down into smaller sub-tasks can be very useful.

Addictive behavior is kind of the inverse of procrastination: procrastination is about not being able to do what you want to do, addiction about not being able to not do what you don't want to do (drink, use drugs, etc.)

Most corporate name changes are the result of mergers and acquisitions. But these tend to be unimaginative.

Framing effects can be very influential, and to the degree that you can think of a task as close rather than distant, you're more likely to actually get it done.

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.

This intelligence, or what I'll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It's the reason it's so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have.