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If youve ever experienced incommensurate rage from slow or oblivious walkers, this TikTok series is for you. Matt Bass has always been a walker, often logging 10 miles per day on weekends. Recently, hes taken to the streets of New York City, phone in hand, documenting what he calls bad walkers. I decided to start a TikTok to capture some of the moments you have to see to believe, Bass tells Fast Company over email. @mvttbvss Who else gasped or had a visceral reaction when this one started? I consider this horror genre of walking because its that scary. Really forcing the rest of society to bend to your whim when you have a formation this wide. 0/10 score #nyc #newyork #newyorkcity #fyp #nyclife original sound – Matt Bass Armed with just an iPhone and a pair of Apple wired earbuds as a makeshift mic, he films incognito behind sunglasses, rating aloud the walking etiquette of those who cross his path. Bass briefly experimented with Ray-Ban Meta glasses for hands-free, clandestine filming, but he found the audio quality lacking and returned to his tried-and-true setup. So, what actually constitutes a bad walker in Basss book? Typically, a formation that is 4 wide, all side by side, will be deemed bad walking etiquette, he says. I think anyone swinging umbrellas or shopping bags is also an example of a bad walker. He adds: The worst walkers are typically taking up the full width of the sidewalk, buried in their phones, not paying attention. Other documented offenses include what he terms drifterspedestrians who unconsciously veer across the path, blocking the entire width. Then theres the chain link fence violationpeople who link arms or hold hands three or more across, obstructing both incoming and outgoing foot traffic. @mvttbvss This one felt nostalgic, like the first episode I ever did. Too slow, too wide, swinging & drifting – checks a lot of boxes. Hope you enjoyed, and I said excuse me for the people that always ask me to #fyp #fyp #foryoupage #foryourpage #nyc #newyorkcity #nyclife #soho #targetaudience original sound – Matt Bass Hes also identified seasonal offenders, like shadow clingersthose who cling to the shade of a building, ignoring standard sidewalk etiquette of staying on the right side in favor of avoiding the sun. Theres even an edition devoted to umbrella etiquette. @mvttbvss Tag a shadow clinger in the comments. I think this is the epitome of inconsiderate walking. Dont force someone else to walk on the wrong side of the path in the heat , you are the obstruction , like a car driving on the wrong side of the road – unjustifiable behavior #fyp #fyp #foryoupage #foryourpage #foryou #newyorkcity #nyc #newyork #nyclife #targetaudience original sound – Matt Bass Its a grievance many can relate to. I’ve found my people. I hate hate hate bad walkers, one commenter posted. Another wrote: The amount of unholy rage that I feel being stuck behind people with no self-awareness is unhealthy! (Bass responded to that latter commenter: Dont worry. Were solving this global crisis, one video at a time.) While Bass takes care not to expose identities or engage confrontatioally, some viewers have criticized his approach. They can go at their own pace. They arent on your time. Go around, one commenter argued. To which Bass replied: People who say ‘just go around’ definitely haven’t walked the streets of New York themselves. Easier said than done in most cases. Bass is clear that good walking etiquette isnt about speed. Not everyone has to be fast, he says. But everyone should be aware of their surroundings and considerate of others. Hes also spotlighted examples of stellar walkers, just so people know what to strive for.
Category:
E-Commerce
Recently, Delta Air Lines announced it would expand its use of artificial intelligence to provide individualized prices to customers. This move sparked concern among flyers and politicians. But Delta isnt the only business interested in using AI this way. Personalized pricing has already spread across a range of industries, from finance to online gaming. Customized pricingwhere each customer receives a different price for the same productis a holy grail for businesses because it boosts profits. With customized pricing, free-spending people pay more while the price-sensitive pay less. Just as clothes can be tailored to each person, custom pricing fits each persons ability and desire to pay. I am a professor who teaches business school students how to set prices. My latest book, The Power of Cash: Why Using Paper Money is Good for You and Society, highlights problems with custom pricing. Specifically, Im worried that AI pricing models lack transparency and could unfairly take advantage of financially unsophisticated people. The history of custom pricing For much of history, customized pricing was the normal way things happened. In the past, business owners sized up each customer and then bargained face-to-face. The price paid depended on the buyers and sellers bargaining skillsand desperation. An old joke illustrates this process. Once, a very rich man was riding in his carriage at breakfast time. Hungry, he told his driver to stop at the next restaurant. He went inside, ordered some eggs, and asked for the bill. When the owner handed him the check, the rich man was shocked at the price. Are eggs rare in this neighborhood? he asked. No, the owner said. Eggs are plentiful, but very rich men are quite rare. Custom pricing through bargaining still exists in some industries. For example, car dealerships often negotiate a different price for each vehicle they sell. Economists refer to this as first-degree or perfect price discrimination, which is perfect from the sellers perspective because it allows them to charge each customer the maximum amount theyre willing to pay. Currently, most American shoppers dont bargain but instead see set prices. Many scholars trace the rise of set prices to John Wanamakers Philadelphia department store, which opened in 1876. In his store, each item had a nonnegotiable price tag. These set prices made it simpler for customers to shop and became very popular. Why uniform pricing caught on Set prices have several advantages for businesses. For one thing, they allow stores to hire low-paid retail workers instead of employees who are experts in negotiation. Historically, they also made it easier for stores to decide how much to charge. Before the advent of AI pricing, many companies determined prices using a cost-plus rule. Cost-plus means a business adds a fixed percentage or markup to an items cost. The markup is the percentage added to a products cost that covers a companys profits and overhead. The big-box retailer Costco still uses this rule. It determines prices by adding a roughly 15% maximum markup to each item on the warehouse floor. If something costs Costco $100, they sell it for about $115. The problem with cost-plus is that it treats all items the same. For example, Costco sells wine in many stores. People buying expensive Champagne typically are willing to pay a much higher markup than customers purchasing inexpensive boxed wine. Using AI gets around this problem by letting a computer determine the optimal markup item by item. What personalized pricing means for shoppers AI needs a lot of data to operate effectively. The shift from cash to electronic payments has enabled businesses to collect whats been called a gold mine of information. For example, Mastercard says its data lets companies determine optimal pricing strategies. So much information is collected when you pay electronically that in 2024 the Federal Trade Commission issued civil subpoenas to Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, and other financial companies demanding to know how artificial intelligence and other technological tools may allow companies to vary prices using data they collect about individual consumers finances and shopping habits. Experiments at the FTC show that AI programs can even collude among themselves to raise prices without human intervention. To prevent customized pricing, some states have laws requiring retailers to display a single price for each product for sale. Even with these laws, its simple to do custom pricing by using targeted digital coupons, which vary each shoppers discount. How you can outsmart AI pricing There are ways to get around customized pricing All depend on denying AI programs data on past purchases and knowledge of who you are. First, when shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, use paper money. Yes, good old-fashioned cash is private and leaves no data trail that follows you online. Second, once online, clear your cache. Your search history and cookies provide algorithms with extensive amounts of information. Many articles say the protective power of clearing your cache is an urban myth. However, this information was based on how airlines used to price tickets. Recent analysis by the FTC shows the newest AI algorithms are changing prices based on this cached information. Third, many computer pricing algorithms look at your location, since location is a good proxy for income. I was once in Botswana and needed to buy a plane ticket. The price on my computer was about $200. Unfortunately, before booking I was called away to dinner. After dinner my computer showed the cost was $1,000five times higher. It turned out after dinner I used my universitys VPN, which told the airline I was located in a rich American neighborhood. Before dinner I was located in a poor African town. Shutting off the VPN reduced the price. Last, often to get a better price in face-to-face negotiations, you need to walk away. To do this online, put something in your basket and then wait before hitting purchase. I recently bought eyeglasses online. As a cash payer, I didnt have my credit card handy. It took five minutes to find it, and the delay caused the site to offer a large discount to complete the purchase. The computer revolution has created the ability to create custom products cheaply. The cashless society combined with AI is setting us up for customized prices. In a custom-pricing situation, seeing a high price doesnt mean something is higher quality. Instead, a high price simply means a business views the customer as willing to part with more money. Using cash more often can help defeat custom pricing. In my view, however, rapid advances in AI mean we need to start talking now about how prices are determined, before customized pricing takes over completely. Jay L. Zagorsky is an associate professor at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Vanessa Urch Druskat is an associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of New Hampshire. She is a social and organizational psychologist, an award-winning scholar, and a pioneer of the concept of team emotional intelligence. Vanessa also serves on the executive board of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. Whats the big idea? There is abundant evidence that teams are far better than individuals at making difficult decisions and solving complex problems. In fact, high-performing teamwork has driven every major innovation in human history. But how do you build an excellent team? Thats the challenge. It turns out that its not that difficult once you know the basic guidelines, but it does involve persistent intent and team involvement. Below, Vanessa shares five key insights from her new book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups that Outperform the Rest. Listen to the audio versionread by Vanessa herselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Building great teams is not about hiring stars. Many leaders believe that building a high-performing team requires hiring star employees. However, intelligence, abilities, and personalities are poor predictors of how people behave in teams and what they can contribute to a teams success. This evidence has existed for decades, but most people have been indoctrinated into focusing on individual performance. By far, the best predictor of motivation and behavior in teams is the specific norms that a team adopts to define how members will interact and work together. Norms are the patterns of behavior, routines, habits, and rituals that define a teams culture, making each team unique. Norms vary greatly among teams conducting the same tasks. They also affect the extent to which team members intrinsic needs are addressed, which in turn arouses the emotions that influence their motivation and trust in teamwork and collaboration. For example, neuroscientists find that evolution has shaped us to be highly sensitive to signals of disrespect and social rejection. These emotions foster distrust in teamwork and motivate self-protection and conformity driven by egoistic concerns. Teamwork thrives when norms foster and maintain a sense of belonging within a community. On the other hand, neuroscience reveals that our brain craves a sense of genuine acceptance and mutual support within groups. Teamwork thrives when norms foster and maintain a sense of belonging within a community. We found such norms in the highest-performing teams we studied across industries. The reliability of these norms engendered trust, psychological safety, and a shared sense of ownership over team outcomes. Members felt more in control of their own fateand the teams. Formal and informal team leaders establish the norms that govern behavior within teams. Many leaders unknowingly propagate norms that dont support belongingness and trust. Instead, in the name of efficiency, they establish norms that prioritize the direct exchange of information and resources without requiring empathy or mutual support. On the surface, this can seem perfectly satisfactory to leaders. Our research identifies such norms in average-performing teams across industries. The lack of community reduces engagement and collaboration, which are essential to innovation and high-performing teamwork. The disappointment this creates can lead to disengagement and, in some cases, even destructive behavior. 2. Your team needs emotionally intelligent norms. My colleagues and I found that the best teams adopt emotionally intelligent norms. These norms address the innate needs of all team members, thereby creating a productive social and emotional environment that supports active participation, effort, and critical, sometimes heated, debates that lead to successful team decisions and outcomes. The leaders of the highest-performing teams dont just hope that team members generosity and social skills will emerge to support effective collaboration. They intentionally create these norms and routines. 3. Team members need to understand each other better. My colleagues and I worked with a global leadership team that wasnt reaching its full potential because members were working in silos rather than focusing on the teams shared goals. They were competing with one another, rather than collaborating. The leaders of the highest-performing teams dont just hope that team members generosity and social skills will emerge to support effective collaboration. With our help, they decided to adopt norms and routines that enabled them to learn more about each others roles and responsibilities. They even visited one anothers office locations. It boosted their sense of belonging and mutual support, which enabled the sharing of feedback and ideas that benefited the success of each person. Much of this feedback helped increase the emotional intelligence of individual team members, which in turn improved their relationships outside of the team. Think of it this way: No sports team or musical group would assume they could play well together unless they knew something about their teammates unique backgrounds and talents, as well as what that person needed from others to play at their best. 4. You need routine assessments of the teams strengths and opportunities. We worked with a team whose new leader was overly controlling and projected his fear of making mistakes onto his teammates. Team performance declined, prompting the leader to replace two team members. As a result, team members felt undervalued and fearful, which increased competition within the team and hindered collaboration. With the leaders support, they developed a proactive action plan to adopt team norms, which included monthly structured meetings. During these meetings, team members first discussed what was and wasnt working well in the team and brainstormed changes they would incorporate to ensure their teams goal achievement. Their new norms increased their focus on helping and learning from one another. By collaborating to address the teams and members challenges, the team leaders confidence in the team increased, and the team outpaced its competitors within the year. You need to develop norms that engage your team in both optimistic and pessimistic discussions. The team needs to both anticipate problems and create a vivid, hopeful, and motivating view of their ability to achieve shared success. 5. Engaging with stakeholders fosters innovative thinking within teams. One team we worked with adopted a norm of ensuring stakeholder communication and involvement. They developed a stakeholder map that listed their stakeholders and then assigned one team mmber to serve as an ambassador to each. The information they obtained helped them think more strategically about their priorities and ask for resources that would support their performance (for example, support for changes that the team sought). In one manufacturing organization, good relationships with stakeholders enabled a team to receive new and improved equipment. In a pharma team, good relationships allowed the team to receive quicker decisions from senior management. You need to develop norms that engage your team in both optimistic and pessimistic discussions. The highest-performing teams we studied recognized that they did not have all the information and resources they needed to succeed within their teams. I like to say that a team doesnt need to reinvent the wheel if they talk to someone outside of their team to learn that the wheel exists. Building high-performing teams is not rocket science, but it does require leaders to recognize that team building is not about fixing people or hiring for the perfect set of skills. The leader of one of the highest-performing teams we studied in a Fortune 100 company said it best when she told me: No one on my team has A+ skills, but we collaborate in ways that produce A+ work. If there is a secret to building great teams, its the need to develop interaction norms and routines that bring out the best in team members and utilize team members talents. Emotionally intelligent norms arouse intrinsic motivation and build continuous assessment, learning, and adaptation into a teams everyday culture. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
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