Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Sunita Sah, Professor of Management and Organizations, Cornell University

You’re in a meeting when your boss suggests changing a number to make the quarterly report look stronger. Heads nod. The slides move on. You feel a knot in your stomach: Do you speak up and risk being branded difficult, or stay silent and become complicit?

Most people picture defiance as dramatic outbursts. In reality, it’s often these small, tense moments where conscience collides with compliance.

I first saw the power of defiance not in the workplace, but closer to home. My mother was the ultimate people-pleaser: timid, polite, eager to accommodate. Barely 4 feet, 10 inches tall, she put everyone else’s needs above her own. But one day, when I was 7, I saw a different side to her.

We were walking home from the grocery store in West Yorkshire, England, when a group of teenage boys blocked our path in a narrow alleyway. They hurled racist insults and told us to “go back home.”

My reaction was instantaneous: Stay quiet, avoid conflict and get past them as quickly as possible. I grabbed my mother’s arm, urging her to move with me. But she didn’t. My quiet, deferential, never-confrontational mother did something completely different. She stopped, turned and looked the boys directly in the eyes. Then she asked, calmly but firmly, “What do you mean?”

She wasn’t loud or aggressive. And in that moment, she showed me that defiance doesn’t always roar, and it can come from the people you least expect.

I’ve carried these lessons into my work as a physician-turned-organizational psychologist. For decades, I’ve studied why people comply, staying silent when they don’t want to, and how they can resist wisely. In my book “Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes,” I offer a framework based on behavioral science research that can help you defy in ways that are intentional, effective and true to your values.

What defiance really is

When people think of defiance, they often picture teenagers slamming doors, protesters shouting in the streets or rebels breaking rules just for the thrill of it. But that’s not the kind of defiance I study or the kind that shapes our lives most often.

Defiance is not about being oppositional for its own sake. It’s about choosing to act in line with your values when there is pressure to do otherwise.

That pressure can come from anywhere: a boss urging you to fudge the numbers, a friend nudging you toward something you don’t believe in, a culture telling you to stay in your place. Defiance in those moments might be as small as saying “no,” asking for clarification or simply pausing instead of rushing along with the group. Other times, it means speaking up, challenging authority or maybe walking away.

Seen this way, defiance isn’t a fixed trait that some people are born with and others lack. It’s a practice: a skill you can strengthen over time. Some days you might comply, other days you might resist. What matters is that you have the awareness and the tools to make the choice consciously, rather than letting fear or habit decide for you.

Why people comply

If defiance is so important, why do people so often stay silent?

One reason is a psychological process I’ve uncovered in my research: insinuation anxiety. It arises when people worry that not complying with another person’s wishes may be interpreted as a signal of distrust. Turning down a boss’s request to “adjust” the numbers might feel like you’re implying they’re dishonest. To avoid that discomfort, you go along – even when it violates your values.

Behavioral science has long documented this pull toward compliance. In the 1960s, for example, psychologist Stanley Milgram showed that ordinary people would administer what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to strangers simply because an authority figure told them to.

My own research has shown surprisingly high levels of compliance with obviously bad advice, even when given by a stranger with no consequences for disagreeing. People feel immense social pressure to go along with what others suggest. That’s because if you’ve never been trained in how to say no, it feels uncomfortable and awkward.

A framework for action

If compliance is the human default, how can you build the muscle of defiance? In my research, I’ve developed a simple actionable guide that I call the Defiance Compass. Like a navigation aid, it orients you in difficult situations by asking three questions:

1. Who am I? What are the core values that matter most to me?
2. What type of situation is this? Is it safe to resist? Will it have a positive impact?
3. What does a person like me do in a situation like this? How can I take responsibility and act in a way that’s consistent with my identity and values?

Asking these questions shifts defiance from a gut reaction to a conscious practice. And here’s what’s important: That third question (“What does a person like me do?”) circles back to the first (“Who am I?”), because how you act again and again becomes who you are.

Defiance doesn’t always mean open confrontation. Sometimes it means asking a clarifying question, buying time or quietly refusing. It can mean speaking up or walking away. The key is to start small, practice regularly and anchor your choices in your values. Like any skill, the more you practice, the more natural it becomes.

Why defiance matters now

Defiance may be risky, but it’s never been more relevant. At work, employees are pressured to meet targets at any cost. In politics, citizens face waves of misinformation and polarization. In everyday life, people struggle to set healthy boundaries. Across all these contexts, the temptation to comply for the sake of comfort is strong.

That’s why learning to defy strategically matters. It protects personal integrity, strengthens institutions and helps sustain democracy. And it doesn’t require being loud or confrontational.

Of course, not every act of defiance is safe or guaranteed to make a difference. Sometimes it comes at real personal cost and some people still choose to act even when the impact isn’t certain: think of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat, or Colin Kaepernick taking a knee. In those moments, the act itself becomes the message. Both of those individuals were deeply connected to their values and the assessment is personal: What feels worth the risk to one person might not to another.

Defiance does require practice: noticing when values are at stake, pausing before you nod along, and choosing actions that align with who you want to be. Each act of consent, compliance or defiance shapes not just your story but the stories of our societies.

If you practice defiance, and teach it and model it, you can imagine a different type of society. You can start to envision a world where, in that same alleyway from my childhood, one of the boys will step forward and tell his friends, “That’s not OK. Let them pass.”

Sunita Sah does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The science of defiance: A psychology researcher explains why people comply – and how to resist – https://theconversation.com/the-science-of-defiance-a-psychology-researcher-explains-why-people-comply-and-how-to-resist-264567

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Li Li (李黎), Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Penn State

When you think about heat waves, you might picture sweltering cities, shimmering asphalt and unbearable summer afternoons. These heat waves dominate the headlines because we feel them directly.

Rivers, on the other hand, are often seen as cool refuges, places to escape the heat of summer.

Yet rivers are heating up, too. In fact, they’re heating up faster than the air.

New research from my team shows that riverine heat waves – periods of abnormally high water temperatures in rivers – are becoming more common, more intense and longer-lasting than they were 40 years ago. Their frequency, intensity and duration are also increasing at rates more than twice as fast as heat waves in the atmosphere.

The increased heat puts more stress on aquatic ecosystems, water quality, energy production and agriculture, and it can threaten species that rely on cool streams.

A hidden threat

Riverine heat waves are disruptive in ways that can cascade through aquatic ecosystems.

Cold-water fish such as trout and salmon are especially vulnerable: Extended periods of abnormally high water temperatures can impair reproduction, slow growth and trigger mass die-offs.

Warmer water also holds less oxygen, potentially suffocating aquatic life. In addition, hot water increases the likelihood of algae blooms and elevates the cost of treating water to make it safe for drinking. Warmer water can also create problems for energy production. Many thermoelectric fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants depend on river water for cooling, and warmer water reduces energy production efficiency, which could mean higher power costs.

Despite these serious risks, riverine heat waves have gone quietly unnoticed.

That’s due, in part, to the narrow width of rivers and streams. Oceans and lakes are large enough that they can be monitored consistently by satellites. Rivers, however, are harder to track, especially small rivers. Measuring the temperatures in narrow, winding streams requires high resolution that many satellite sensors lack.

Scientists with universities and government agencies have installed many sensors in streams to measure water temperature, and sensor numbers have proliferated since the 1990s. But the data has been patchy and inconsistent. Until recently, scientists lacked the tools to stitch these fragments into a coherent picture. We developed a way to do it.

AI helps create the full picture

To overcome this challenge, we trained a deep learning model to use scattered and inconsistent records to reconstruct continuous daily water temperatures across 1,471 river sites in the contiguous U.S. from 1980 to 2022.

The reconstructed histories of change enabled us, for the first time, to systematically compare the characteristics of riverine and air heat waves across a large and diverse set of rivers and reveal trends that might otherwise remain invisible.

The results reveal a troubling pattern.

On average, we found that riverine heat waves occur about half as often as air heat waves, and their temperature increases are a third as intense, but they last nearly twice as long.

More strikingly, their frequency is increasing faster than air heat wave events are. Compared to 1980, an average U.S. river experienced nearly two additional heat wave events in 2022. In 2022, those river heat waves lasted more than three extra days on average than in 1980 and were nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit (almost half a degree Celsius) hotter than in 1980.

Rivers in the Rockies and the Northeast showed some of the steepest increases, driven in part by shrinking snowpacks that once buffered streams with steady supplies of cold meltwater. The rivers are heating up quietly but faster than the air above them.

The drivers: Climate change and human infrastructure

We also wanted to find out whether these trends were mainly driven by climate change or by local infrastructure and other activity, such as dams and agriculture.

A machine learning model we developed to rank the importance of influential environmental factors that drive riverine heat waves found that rising air temperatures, particularly at night, were consistently the strongest factors behind river warming. Declines in snow and streamflow also played major roles, especially in mountain regions where dwindling snowpacks produce less meltwater.

Human infrastructure and other activities also play important supporting roles.

For example, the presence of large dams tends to lengthen heat waves, as warm reservoir water is released downstream. Agriculture shows more complex effects: In some areas, particularly the Midwest, irrigation and crop cover can actually cool rivers by altering local climate and hydrology. But these influences, whether harmful or helpful, are secondary compared to the overarching force of climate change.

What does the future hold?

In a warming world, riverine heat waves threaten to become a critical but underappreciated dimension of the global water–energy–food nexus.

Heat waves often coincide with low streamflows – a likely outcome as climate change reduces runoff from snowmelt. The risks compound. Low, slow-moving water warms more easily and holds less oxygen, creating dangerous conditions for aquatic life and increasing the chances of large-scale die-offs.

These are not just ecological problems. They also directly influence water and food supplies, along with energy reliability.

Unlike air heat waves, riverine heat waves currently remain largely absent from global monitoring systems and adaptation plans. Better understanding the changes and risks will require more coordinated data collection, better global data sharing across agencies and countries, and incorporating river temperature trends into climate risk assessments.

Li Li (李黎) does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Rivers are heating up faster than the air − that’s a problem for aquatic life and people – https://theconversation.com/rivers-are-heating-up-faster-than-the-air-thats-a-problem-for-aquatic-life-and-people-263718

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Amy Adamczyk, Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, City University of New York

Many factors can shape how someone views abortion – gender, age and education, to name a few. Around the world, however, religious belief is the most powerful predictor that someone will disapprove, as I document in my 2025 book, “Fetal Positions.” Faith traditions’ teachings about abortion vary – and there is diversity of opinions within faiths, too. On average, though, people who say that religion is important in their lives are far more likely to think abortion is morally wrong.

But here’s the paradox: There’s a difference between abstract views and personal decisions. On average, strong religious beliefs and involvement in a religious community do not make an American woman less likely to terminate her first pregnancy, so long as she conceives without a potential marriage partner.

The picture becomes even more complex when we consider not just how religious someone is but which tradition they belong to. Young American women in conservative Protestant churches are about half as likely to say they have aborted a premarital pregnancy than Catholics and mainline Protestants, regardless of how devout they are, according to my co-authored research. Other work has found similar differences among Christian groups. There were too few respondents from other religions to fully assess differences, though unmarried young Jewish women in the U.S. likewise appear to have higher odds of obtaining an abortion than conservative Protestants.

Religion’s role in women’s actual decisions about whether to have an abortion is far more nuanced than abortion attitudes alone would suggest. Understanding these relationships can help lawmakers, advocates and the public develop policies that reflect lived realities, rather than relying on assumptions about ideology alone.

Beyond the clinic

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, I followed approximately 5,000 women over six years. The data covers a period from the mid-1990s, when the women were teenagers, to the early 2000s, when they were in their early 20s.

My goal was to examine their views about abortion, their sexual behavior, whether they had a premarital pregnancy, and whether they gave birth. The survey also asked respondents to indicate their religious affiliation; how much they regularly attended services, participated in youth group activities and prayed; and how important religion was in their lives.

Longitudinal data is especially useful for sorting out patterns between religion and abortion, compared to surveys that look at a single moment in a woman’s life. For example, if someone is seeking an abortion, but their faith tradition disapproves, that cognitive dissonance may affect how she answers questions about her beliefs.

These six years of data form the basis of my earlier studies and contribute to my recent book. I was particularly interested in decisions about first pregnancies, which are especially pivotal. They can derail a college education, limit career opportunities, and reshape long-term goals in ways that can feel irreversible at a young age.

I focused only on unmarried young women who were pregnant for the first time. Approximately 25% of the women who had a premarital pregnancy during the six-year period said that they had terminated it. This percentage was roughly the same regardless of how important faith was to them, how much they prayed, or how often they participated in religious activities.

Sociologists Lexie Milmine and Tina Fetner analyzed 2017 data from Canadian women and came to a similar conclusion. They found that neither religious affiliation nor religious service attendance was significantly associated with the odds that a woman reported one or more abortions.

Type, not intensity

There is one religious factor that makes a difference, though: the type of tradition women report belonging to when they were teenagers.

Although various faiths hold different views of abortions, conservative Christian groups, which are influential in the U.S., generally oppose it – including the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination. The Catholic Church also officially disapproves of abortion, though 6 in 10 U.S. Catholics say it should be legal in all or most cases.

Therefore, in addition to researching strength of religious belief and involvement, I also examined whether the type of Christian religious affiliation mattered in shaping abortion decisions.

Focusing on the same group of unmarried young women, I found that regardless of how much they attended religious activities, prayed or reported that religion was very important in their lives, those who affiliated with a conservative Protestant faith when they were teenagers were less likely to terminate their first pregnancies than Catholics or mainline Protestants, which is similar to findings from other research.

The attitude-behavior gap

My research highlights the disconnect between religion’s role in shaping public opinion about abortion versus its influence on women’s actual decisions.

When it comes to attitudes, the relationship is clear and powerful. Regardless of which specific faith they affiliate with, people who say religion is important in their lives on average express stronger opposition to abortion.

But when women face the reality of an unintended pregnancy, religion’s influence is more nuanced. The strength of her personal devotion fails to explain whether a woman will actually choose to terminate her first pregnancy. In the U.S., the more influential religious factor seems to be which specific religious tradition she belongs to.

Decisions about later pregnancies may be more complicated. For example, around 6 in 10 U.S. abortion patients have had at least one child. It’s not clear how religion shapes mothers’ decisions about how an unexpected pregnancy would affect their family.

In the U.S., public opinion about reproductive rights is largely driven by different religious factors. When it comes to individual decisions about pregnancy, though, which religious tradition someone is affiliated with seems to hold the most sway – at least for first pregnancies outside of marriage.

Amy Adamczyk has received funding from a range of organizations, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Association for the Sociology of Religion, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

– ref. Religion often shapes someone’s view of abortion – but what about a woman’s actual decision? – https://theconversation.com/religion-often-shapes-someones-view-of-abortion-but-what-about-a-womans-actual-decision-265330

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By David L Levy, Professor Emeritus of Management, UMass Boston

Another business-led effort to fight climate change is unraveling.

On Aug. 27, 2025, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance suspended its activities after several major U.S. and European banks backed out.

While most observers are blaming the strong political backlash in the U.S. against climate change action and sustainable investing, we believe the banks didn’t need much of a push: These net-zero alliances never made much business sense and were not particularly effective at fighting climate change. Indeed, for us the puzzle was why they had flourished in the first place.

To examine their rise and fall, we recently conducted a research project that encompassed interviews with more than 80 executives from various financial institutions, activist organizations and oil and gas companies.

Powerful allies grasped climate risks

The Net-Zero Banking Alliance was founded in 2021. Members agreed to limit lending to carbon-intense sectors so that total greenhouse gas emissions from companies in the banks’ loan portfolios are close to zero by 2050.

This target aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement but was not binding and lacked clear shorter-term targets and plans. Similar net-zero networks were established for insurance, asset management and other financial areas, all under the umbrella of the United Nations Environment Program’s Finance Initiative. Over the past 16 months, the insurance and asset managers’ alliances have also suspended their activities.

These net-zero alliances were built on the premise that climate risk equals financial risk and that the challenge requires a collective response. Their goal was to leverage the power of finance to push companies to decarbonize their products and processes.

Key financial regulators, central banks and a few of the largest asset managers propelled these alliances because they perceived that climate change poses serious long-term systemic risks to markets and economies around the world. Influential figures such as Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, and former Bank of England head Mark Carney, now the prime minister of Canada, lent legitimacy to these initiatives.

Some environmental groups also supported these alliances as a smart strategy to pressure companies on climate. Many other financial institutions then joined the net-zero bandwagon, but our research revealed that they didn’t do so because of concern about climate-related financial risks. Rather, they felt an array of pressure from peers, investors, activists, regulators and even their families.

Many people we interviewed mentioned reputational risk as a key driver and saw a low-carbon transition as inevitable, driven by regulation, technological innovation and consumer demand. This was the Biden era, with billions of dollars flowing to clean energy through the Inflation Reduction Act.

The burgeoning field also spawned a specialized but lucrative industry of data providers and consultants who actively marketed carbon management, disclosure and broader sustainability services. The global market for sustainability data and software was estimated at more than US$1 billion in 2024 and growing rapidly.

Climate strategy and sustainability reporting was the fastest-growing business sector for accounting and consulting firms. And asset managers were happy to collect higher fees for funds screened for sustainability – even though these funds have not outperformed the broader market.

These vested interests spurred continued expansion of net-zero networks. Indeed, at its peak in 2024, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance included over 140 members globally with $74 trillion in estimated total assets, representing over 40% of global banking assets.

Political backlash

Given the size and scope of these net-zero networks, what triggered their rapid collapse?

One major factor, of course, was the political backlash against anything connected with climate action and sustainable investing following the 2024 election of President Donald Trump.

Finance officials in more than 20 U.S. states have demanded that major asset managers restrict the use of environment, social and governance benchmarks, accusing them of eroding “traditional fiduciary duty” and claiming they hurt investors.

In August, 23 Republican attorneys general accused organizations created to set standards for corporate climate disclosures of operating an anticompetitive “climate cartel” and violating antitrust laws.

Fossil fuels – too lucrative to abandon

While the political pressure in the U.S. has indeed been intense, the collapse of net-zero networks and the broader corporate retreat from climate commitments is largely due to the continued profitability of fossil fuels and the high costs and risks of deep decarbonization. Investors and banks, of course, want to keep on financing profitable companies and avoid pressuring their clients to take risky measures.

Oil companies such as BP and Shell that had relatively strong climate targets suffered financially as a result, prompting them to retreat from these targets and shift capital from renewable projects back toward fossil fuels. High energy prices in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war made the sector even more lucrative. Low-carbon fuels and processes for industries such as aviation, steel and cement are still very expensive.

Moreover, the Trump administration is abolishing most subsidies for clean energy and freezing permits for offshore wind, while easing regulations and opening more land for oil and gas exploration.

These economic incentives made it hard for the banking alliance to reduce financing for fossil fuels – and the money has kept on flowing into oil and gas projects.

European banks that sharply cut funding to fossil fuel companies saw their business diverted to other banks and to private, nonbank sources of finance, which has soared in the past two years. Facing this loss of business, major banks’ lending to oil and gas companies surged in 2024, driving loans to a three-year high of $869 billion.

The costs of membership in the net-zero alliances also increased over time, with the adoption of stricter standards that called for specific plans and timelines for ending fossil fuel financing entirely. The new standards also required loan recipients to disclose Scope 3 emissions, which include emissions from a company’s suppliers and customers.

Managers in financial institutions told us that the increasingly complex and demanding requirements were generating strong pushback from their clients. We also heard that membership was turning from a reputational asset to a liability, as activist organizations called out the hypocrisy of continued fossil fuel lending despite their commitments to phasing it out.

Ignoring climate change’s long-term risks

Although banks are rushing back to finance fossil fuel projects, these loans typically have long terms of 10 to 25 years. This means they carry the risk that an eventual transition to clean energy will make these projects worthless, “stranded assets.” One study estimates that investors are currently exposed to more than $1 trillion in potential losses.

Why do banks often ignore these risks?

Our interviewees mentioned the organizational silos that separate analysts who assess climate risks from the loan originators. In other words, the employees deciding where to lend money may not be talking to the team that best understands the long-term risks. Moreover, current risk assessment tools are quite crude and don’t generate the quantitative metrics that loan underwriters want.

Finally, loans are increasingly repackaged and sold, or securitized, into the larger corporate debt market, obscuring the risks.

Climate risks are real and growing

The Net-Zero Banking Alliance isn’t disappearing entirely. The group is currently deciding on whether to restructure into a much weaker “framework initiative” that provides voluntary guidance instead of binding commitments.

And some banks leaving the alliance have stated that they will maintain their climate goals and sustainability policies.

But climate risks are real and growing. The Boston Consulting Group recently estimated that just the physical risks – floods, drought and wildfires – could cost companies up to 25% of their profits by 2050 and substantially cut global GDP.

A transition to a low-carbon economy will cost trillions of dollars and create massive disruption – as well as opportunities – as new technologies and companies emerge. The longer that action is delayed, the greater the risks to the planet – and of more drastic shocks to the global economy and financial system.

David L Levy receives funding from the BSF, the Bi-national US-Israel Science Foundation

Rami Kaplan receives funding from the BSF, the Bi-national US-Israel Science Foundation

– ref. Banks retreat from climate change commitments – but it’s business more than politics – https://theconversation.com/banks-retreat-from-climate-change-commitments-but-its-business-more-than-politics-265176

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Peter McGraw, Professor of Marketing and Psychology, University of Colorado Boulder

How can you get ahead in your career and still enjoy the ride?

One solution offered in business books, LinkedIn posts and team-building manuals is to use humor. Sharing jokes, sarcastic quips, ironic memes and witty anecdotes, the advice goes, will make you more likable, ease stress, strengthen teams, spark creativity and even signal leadership potential.

We are professors of marketing and management who study humor and workplace dynamics. Our own research – and a growing body of work by other scholars – shows that it’s harder to be funny than most people think. The downside of cracking a bad joke is often larger than what you might gain by landing a good one.

Fortunately, you don’t have to tell sidesplitting jokes to make humor work for you. You can learn to think like a comedian instead.

Humor is risky business

Comedy works by bending and breaking norms – and when those rules aren’t broken in just the right way, it’s more likely to harm your reputation than to help your team.

We developed the “benign violation theory” to explain what makes things funny – and why attempts at humor so often backfire, especially in the workplace. Essentially, humor arises when something is both wrong and OK at the same time.

People find jokes funny when they break rules while seeming harmless. Miss one of those ingredients when you tell a joke and your audience won’t appreciate it. When it’s all benign and there’s no violation, you get yawns. When it’s all violation and not benign, you could end up triggering outrage.

It’s hard enough to get laughs in the darkness of a comedy club. Under fluorescent office lights, that razor-thin line becomes even harder to walk. What feels wrong but OK to one colleague can feel simply wrong to another, especially across differences in seniority, culture, gender or even the mood they’re in.

An advertising study

In our experiments, when everyday people are asked to “be funny,” most attempts land flat or cross lines.

In a humorous caption contest with business students, described in Peter McGraw’s book on global humor practices, “The Humor Code,” the captions weren’t particularly funny to begin with. However, the ones that were rated by judges as the most funny were often also rated the most distasteful.

Being funny without being offensive is of paramount importance. This is particularly true for women, as a robust literature shows women face harsher backlash than men for behavior seen as offensive or norm-violating such as expressing anger, acting dominantly or even “making asks” in negotiations.

You might end up getting no respect

Research by other scholars who examine leader and manager behavior in organizations tells a similar story.

In one study, managers who used humor effectively were seen as more confident and competent, boosting their status. Yet when their attempts misfired, those same managers lost status and credibility. Other researchers have found that failed humor doesn’t just hurt a manager’s status – it also makes employees less likely to respect that manager, seek their advice, or trust their leadership.

Even when jokes land, humor can backfire. In one study, marketing students instructed to write “funny” copy for advertisements wrote ads that were funnier, but also less effective, than students instructed to write “creative” or “persuasive” copy.

Another study found that bosses who joke too often push employees into pretending to be amused, which drains energy, reduces job satisfaction and increases burnout. And the risks are higher for women due to a double standard. When women use humor in presentations, they are often judged as being less capable and having lower status than men.

The bottom line is that telling a great joke rarely gets you a promotion. And cracking a bad one can jeopardize your job – even if you’re not a talk show host who earns a living making people laugh.

Flip the script

Instead of trying to be funny on the job, we recommend that you focus on what we call “thinking funny” – as described in another of McGraw’s books, “Shtick to Business.”

“The best ideas come as jokes,” advertising legend David Ogilvy once said. “Try to make your thinking as funny as possible.”

But Ogilvy wasn’t telling executives to crack jokes in meetings. He was encouraging employees to think like comedians by flipping expectations, leveraging their networks and finding their niche.

Comics often lead you one way and then flip the script. Comedian Henny Youngman, a master of one-liners, famously quipped, “When I read about the dangers of drinking, I gave up … reading.” The business version of this convention is to challenge an obvious assumption.

For example, Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign, which the outdoor gear company rolled out Black Friday in 2011 as a full-page ad in The New York Times, paradoxically boosted sales by calling out overconsumption.

To apply this method, pick a stale assumption your team holds, such as that adding features to a product always improves it or that having more meetings will lead to smoother coordination, and ask, “What if the opposite were true?”

You’ll discover options that standard brainstorming misses.

Create a chasm

When comedian Bill Burr has his fans in stitches, he knows some people won’t find his jokes funny – and he doesn’t try to win them over.

We’ve observed that many of the best comics don’t try to please everyone. They succeed by deliberately narrowing their audience. And we also find that businesses that do the same build stronger brands.

For example, when Nebraska’s tourism board embraced “Honestly, it’s not for everyone” in a 2019 campaign, targeting out-of-state visitors, web traffic jumped 43%.

Some people want hot tea. Others want iced tea. Serving warm tea satisfies no one. Likewise, you can succeed in business by deciding whom your idea is for, and whom it’s not for, then tailoring your product, policy or presentation accordingly.

Cooperate to innovate

Stand-up may look like a solo act. But comics depend on feedback – punch-ups from fellow comedians and reactions from audiences – iterating jokes in the same way lean startups may innovate new products.

Building successful teams at work means listening before speaking, making your partners look good, and balancing roles. Improv teacher Billy Merritt has described three types of improvisers. Pirates are risk-takers. Robots are structure builders. Ninjas are adept at both, taking risks and building structures.

A team designing a new app, for instance, needs all three: Pirates to propose bold features, robots to streamline the interface, and ninjas to bridge gaps. Empowering everyone in these roles leads to braver ideas with fewer blind spots.

Gifts aren’t universal

Telling someone to “be funny” is like telling them to “be musical.” Many of us can keep a beat, but few have what it takes to become rock stars.

That’s why we argue that it’s smarter to think like a comedian than to try to act like one.

By reversing assumptions, cooperating to innovate, and creating chasms, professionals can generate fresh solutions and stand out – without becoming an office punchline.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why you seriously need to stop trying to be funny at work – https://theconversation.com/why-you-seriously-need-to-stop-trying-to-be-funny-at-work-265036

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Michael Nalick, Assistant Professor of Management, University of Denver

A CEO’s canoodling with his company’s human resources chief – caught on the “kiss cam” at a Coldplay concert – made global headlines this summer. Beyond the memes and tabloid fodder, personal lives were shattered and a company was left in turmoil after its leader’s sudden exit.

The case, involving the AI firm Astronomer, may be the most visible of recent CEO personal scandals – think sex affairs, drug abuse or embarrassing behavior – but it’s not an isolated incident. Just weeks following the Coldplay “kiss cam,” the CEO of Nestlé was shown the door for similar behavior involving a relationship with a subordinate. Personal scandals have been the top cause of CEO terminations in recent years.

How do these scandals stack up to other corporate indiscretions, such as financial fraud? As a management professor, I knew that there’s lots of research on CEOs’ financial crimes, but surprisingly little on personal misdeeds.

So my colleagues and I examined nearly 400 CEO scandals involving either financial or personal misconduct. In this research, published in August 2025 in the journal Strategic Organization, we found that not all CEO scandals are treated equally: The type makes all the difference.

Personal scandals are harder to survive

For most people, personal indiscretions – such as having an extramarital affair or abusing drugs – are a private matter. But for CEOs, even scandals unrelated to business create doubt about their judgment, integrity and leadership. The result is usually career-ending for the CEO, research shows, and can create lasting harm for the company.

We found that CEOs overwhelmingly exit in the wake of personal scandals – five times as often as CEOs who commit financial misconduct do, in fact. And strong business performance doesn’t tend to offer protection.

For example, Hewlett-Packard’s Mark Hurd, who’s widely credited with turning around HP in the mid-2000s, was ousted following a very visible personal misconduct scandal 15 years ago. The fallout was swift: The company’s stock fell nearly 10% immediately after the announcement, and with leadership in a tailspin, it dropped more than 40% within a year.

Why bad numbers come with better odds

Companies are also routinely accused of “cooking the books.” In recent months, several firms have been forced to restate their earnings after their financial statements didn’t add up. These scandals shake investor trust, trigger sharp drops in company stock and often lead to the chief financial officer’s departure – with some CEOs following suit.

However, while cooking the books is considered a severe form of corporate misconduct, our research suggests that it has fewer job-ending repercussions for CEOs than personal scandals do. Roughly half of all CEOs implicated in financial scandals survive, we found – because, unlike in personal scandals, CEOs can often shift blame.

We also found that CEOs dismissed due to financial scandals tend to be replaced with outside candidates, which has been shown to stabilize a company’s stock price and lead to stronger long-term performance.

It might be surprising to learn that a CEO’s personal misconduct can come at a greater cost – both to the business and the executive – than outright financial fraud. Is corporate America overestimating the importance of CEOs’ private behavior? Or is it underestimating the importance of cooking the books?

While I don’t have answers to these questions, I think our findings show the need for more discussion – and more research.

I have received funding from Deloitte for a separate project on sociopolitical activism.

– ref. Personal scandals sink CEOs faster than financial fraud, research shows – https://theconversation.com/personal-scandals-sink-ceos-faster-than-financial-fraud-research-shows-265725