A study at Loughborough University, UK, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email, so people who check their email every five minutes waste 8.5 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

When large companies are organized in the traditional divisional structure, strategic decisions often fall to managers under short-term budgetary pressure. Success in one unit hides failures in others and ventures that promise strong future growth are starved if they can't contribute short-term.

One of the key lessons from NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is the importance of being congruent. If you don't really believe what you are saying your incongruence will "leak" to your audience.

Alexander Kandybin, of Booz & Company, suggests consumer products companies need to look to the power of natural selection to break out of the incremental innovation trap.

Neither snap judgements nor sleeping on a problem are any better than conscious thinking for making complex decisions, according to new research. The finding debunks a controversial 2006 research result asserting that unconscious thought is superior for complex decisions, such as buying a house or car. If anything, the new study suggests that conscious thought leads to better choices.

Business veterans claim you cannot teach 'experience', but European researchers say you can. The team developed software that helps players acquire real-life skills and realistic experiences through game playing. But this game is no executive toy. The interactive software has caught the imagination of both business colleges and major enterprises.

The way small causes yield huge effects is itself only one piece of the much grander idea of simplexity, a science that is increasingly being studied at universities and institutes around the world, but nowhere more intensely than at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. No single unified rule governs all complex or simple systems, but there are a few big ones.

Think Differently: Long-term success is not only determined by how well a company handles a downturn, but also by its foresight in preparing for the next upturn. In the midst of a recession, corporate leaders are often forced to restructure and control expenses, but those who focus only on the immediate crisis may be left behind when better times return.