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Credit: Cristina Gabaldon, US Navy For people in poverty, remembering better times and past success improves their brain functioning by ten IQ points and increases their willingness to seek help from crucial aid services, a new study finds.  In other words, focusing on your past successes not only makes you feel better about yourself, it helps open you up to possible paths to a different, if not better life, and, not so amazingly, increases your IQ.  The findings suggest that reconnecting with your feelings of self-worth reduces the powerful stigma and psychological barriers that make it harder for low-income individuals to make good decisions or access the very assistance services that can help them get back on their feet. "This study shows that surprisingly simple acts of self-affirmation can improve the cognitive function and behavioral outcomes of people in poverty," says University of British Columbia Professor Jiaying Zhao and study co-author. Now, stop and think about ...

http://knowledge.insead.edu The Future of Business is Multi-cultural It's a fact of our changing society:  businesses, especially service businesses, that want to succeed with minority customers should consider hiring frontline employees who represent those ethnic groups, particularly when the business caters to Hispanics or Asians, a recent UT Arlington study contends. Elten Briggs, associate professor of marketing, and Detra Montoya, clinical associate professor of marketing at Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business  analyzed the influence of shared ethnicity on consumer behavior using an experiment and a survey. The experiment focused on 112 Hispanic customers of a financial services firm in a major U.S. metropolitan area. The survey asked 285 Asians, Hispanics and Caucasians in a major U.S. city about marketplace experiences that could be attributed to their ethnicity. "The study showed that culture plays an important role in the interaction between b...

Learn from evolution  and copy and replicate rather than create new processes . There are times when a business owner decides that their current model just isn't working as they hoped it would, particularly in the early months and years.  The question becomes, should the entrepreneur just dump what they're doing now?  Or make incremental changes with an end goal in mind? Research by a University of Hertfordshire Professor of Business Studies published in 2010 states that solutions for many of today's business challenges can be found in evolutionary processes. According to Professor Geoffrey Hodgson at the University's Business School, businesses which are considering major change at the moment should proceed with caution; they could do better to learn from evolution and copy and replicate rather than create new processes. "Change needs to be experimental and cautious," said Professor Hodgson. "We have to understand the cost of change. If we look to nature...