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

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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November 6, 2026

You get about 3 minutes of focus before something breaks it. Nearly half the time, that something is you.

Picture a founder on a Tuesday. She opens a pricing proposal. Four minutes later she checks Slack, though nobody asked her to. Then email, then a competitor's website. An hour later the proposal is still open, and she's sure her team keeps interrupting her. Gloria Mark, a researcher at UC Irvine, shadowed 36 managers, analysts, developers, engineers and project leaders for 3 days. On average, people worked 3 minutes and 5 seconds before they switched tasks or something interrupted them. About 44% of the interruptions came from the workers themselves. Nobody pinged them. After an interruption, people took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task, with about 2 other tasks in between. They did go back to about 82% of that work the same day. The damage is the delay, repeated across roughly 12 streams of work a day. Sophie Leroy calls the leftover piece attention residue. When you leave a task unfinished, part of your attention stays with it, which leaves less for the next task, and the effect grows when the work is demanding. Here are 3 things to try for a week. They're suggestions, not research findings: 1. Close email and chat during your most important task, and check them at set times instead. 2. Before you switch to anything else, write one line about where you stopped and what comes next. 3. Tally every time you reach for your phone or open a new tab with no ping prompting you. Write the count down each evening and compare days. What's the first thing you check when work gets hard? Be honest.

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