Newsletter Archive
January 2007
BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS AND ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS
On Saturday, George Akerlof (a Nobel Laureate in Economics) gave his presidential address to the annual meeting of the American Economic Association. He called for a return to "sensible economics" and took the economics profession to task for failing to take into account common sense and observations of actual human behavior. (For a more detailed discussion, see the NY Times article).
Along with a small but growing number of influential economists, Akerlof is at the leading edge of the "behavioral economics" revolution - an attempt to integrate insights from psychology with neo-classical economic theory. While this may all sound a bit esoteric, it has very practical and real implications for understanding and improving organizational performance - and for the work that we do at McBassi & Company.
IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR WORK
In particular, McBassi combines insights from psychology about motivation and behavior in the workplace with economists' methodologies for identifying the causal determinants of business results. This work enables our clients to replace ad hoc, gut-level decisions about optimizing organizational performance with rigorous, reality-based priorities for improving performance through human capital management initiatives that will have the greatest impact on key business outcomes. Such organizations simultaneously become more effective businesses and better places to work.
To find out more about how our work helps organizations become demonstrably more effective, see the "Success Stories" on our web page.