Value creation, innovative business models, and non-traditional marketing.

November 9, 2026

Someone told you that you're a visual learner or an auditory learner. Teaching to that style is the part with little evidence behind it. In one U.S. survey,…

People do report preferences. The claim that matters is that matching teaching to a style improves results. In 2008, psychologists Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork reviewed the evidence in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They counted 71 proposed learning style models. A fair test sorts learners into categories, randomly assigns them to different teaching methods, and gives everyone the same test at the end. If styles matter, each group should do best with the method that matches its style. Few studies used that design, and some contradicted matching. The authors concluded the evidence was insufficient to justify using learning styles in teaching. Say a manager sorts new hires into visual, auditory and hands on learners and builds a separate training track for each. The review studied education, not workplaces, but training is teaching too, and building three tracks costs time and budget. As of that 2008 review, the evidence that teaching to preferences improves learning was not there. Here are 3 things to try instead. They're suggestions, not research findings: - Pick the format by what you're teaching, not by who is learning. Use a diagram for something spatial, a worked example for a procedure, and practice for a skill. - Give everyone the same test at the end, so you can compare training methods. - Ask what people learned, not whether they liked the session. Has anyone ever told you that you're a visual or auditory learner? Did it change how you studied?

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November 8, 2026

Adding a pricing option that nobody picked lifted the bundle from 32% to 84% in an MIT experiment. Researchers then made 91 attempts to produce the same…

Dan Ariely's 2008 book Predictably Irrational popularized the trick. A subscription page offered web only for $59, print only for $125, and print plus web for $125. Nobody should pick print only, since print plus web costs the same. Ariely reported giving the options to 100 MIT students. With all three, 84% chose print plus web, 16% chose web only, and none chose print only. Without the print only option, 68% chose web only and 32% chose print plus web. His explanation: the useless option, the decoy, makes the bundle look better by comparison. Picture a founder who adds a decoy tier because a book said it would lift sales. Three months later revenue is flat, and she blames her copy. In 2014, two papers in the Journal of Marketing Research tested it on more realistic choices. Frederick, Lee and Baskin found the effect largely disappeared, and sometimes the decoy lowered the target's share. Yang and Lynn made the 91 attempts across 23 product categories, and 11 showed a reliable effect, about 12%. Pictures and qualitative descriptions reduced or removed it. Huber, Payne and Puto, the original decoy researchers, did not dispute the findings and called the effect fragile. Students picking from a menu are not customers or prospects spending their own money, so a tactic that works with them may fade or backfire on your pricing page. Test it. Show half your visitors the old page and half the new one, and compare what they buy. Decide your sample size before you start, and do not stop early when the numbers look good. Which pricing tactic did you adopt before you tested it?

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November 7, 2026

Toys R Us owed lenders about $400 million a year in interest, whether it sold toys or not.

Most people blame Amazon for killing it. Fortune's analysis says the debt landed the first blow. In 2005, Bain Capital, KKR and Vornado Realty Trust agreed to buy the chain for $6.6 billion. It was a leveraged buyout, so the debt fell on Toys R Us itself, about $5.2 billion of it. Picture the CEO's budget meeting. Your stores need updating to compete with Amazon and Walmart. Lenders already claim about $400 million of your year. Anything new waits in line behind the interest. Fortune's view was that Amazon and online shopping delivered the final push. Amazon did hurt. In 2000, Toys R Us signed a ten year deal making Amazon its exclusive online toy supplier. Amazon later let other sellers list toys too. Toys R Us sued in 2006 and won $51 million in 2009, more than half of the $93 million it claimed. That court award equaled about one eighth of one year's interest. When Toys R Us filed for Chapter 11 on September 18, 2017, it still carried about $5 billion in long term debt. The bankruptcy court approved more than $2 billion in new borrowing to pay suppliers. It announced 180 store closures in January 2018, and its last U.S. stores closed on June 29, 2018. Customers were still there: Fortune reported it held 15% of U.S. toy revenue and began 2018 with more than 800 U.S. stores. Amazon was the competitor everyone could see. The debt payment never took a day off, and it came due whether sales were good or bad. Write down what you must pay every month before you earn a dollar. Could you cover the biggest bill through three slow months?

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