The Perils of Confidence, Just Puttering Around, Etc. takes

Feeling confident your latest campaign will be a hit? Or that you'll win the account you're pitching? Don't count on it. According to a Wharton School professor who studies "knowledge calibration"—the relationship between confidence and accuracy—when someone making a prediction feels veryconfident about it, "that person is almost always overconfident." For example, when a manager is "90 percent confident" about landing a deal, "the real odds may turn out to be closer to 70 percent." It doesn't help to "sleep on it," since the process of going over old information tends to boost people's level of confidence "without changing the probability that they are right." On the other hand, when people think they're merely guessing, they often underestimate themselves. "Intuition is a good guide in taking you beyond 50-50 odds to 60 percent or 65 percent," says the Wharton professor,J. Wesley Hutchinson.Underlings may not be surprised to hear that chief executives of Fortune 1000 companies are disciples of Homer Simpson. At least, many of them watch his show religiously. A survey of Fortune 1000 CEOs by New York-based Jericho Communications discovered that 21 percent of respondents regularly watch The Simpsons, while just 6 percent claimed to have watched all three of last fall's presidential debates.The golf ball in the Never Compromise ad may not be a great conversationalist. Nonetheless, the spectacle of a ball that speaks at all will be sufficiently unusual to attract attention among habitués of the links. As is often the case in ads for golfing gear, the copy makes you suspect that if the extensive research devoted to club technology were redirected, it could cure every disease known to man. But that'll just make golfers more eager to avail themselves of this putter and its well-balanced polymers. Agency for the effort is Skirt of Pacific Palisades, Calif.Maybe voters would have been more impressed had Al Gore invented the TV set rather than the Internet. In an online poll by CNN.com, people were asked to say which "communications innovation" of the last 100 years changed people's lives the most: radio, television or the computer? TV won a plurality of the vote (47 percent), with the computer running second (37 percent) and radio a distant third (15 percent).How do gays differ from heterosexuals? The former are more likely to book their travel online. A study of wired travelers byForrester Research finds "41 percent of gays and lesbians had booked travel on the Net compared with 28 percent of straight consumers." The research firm says gays/lesbians now constitute 3.5 percent of the online-traveler cohort and 5 percent of those who've bought travel online. When people are sniffling and wheezing, do they want a lot of sympathetic attention? Not according to a poll conducted for Bayer by Opinion Research Corp. As summarized on the WorldOpinion Web site, the study found 73 percent of Americans saying they prefer to be left alone when they have a respiratory-tract infection. Just 25 percent said they want to be pampered. People age 55 and over were more likely than younger folks to prefer solitude when suffering such ills. When convalescing, 51 percent spend their time sleeping, while 20 percent watch television and 13 percent read.

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The Perils of Confidence, Just Puttering Around, Etc. takes

Mark Dolliver

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Mark Dolliver