If believe your IQ is fixed, you probably won’t get any smarter. But if you believe you can learn new things you will. That’s the message of a study by Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck and others. People who believe they’re getting smarter tend to study harder, persist in the face of setbacks, and create wider neural networks, all of which makes them, well, smarter.

Isn’t it amazing what the right attitude can do?

According to an article in this month’s Wired, a little caffeine goes a long way. As the day progresses, your brain produces adenosine which is thought to create mental fatigue. Caffeine blocks the brain’s adenosine receptors, so you don’t lose your focus. But test subjects report that they felt clearheaded and calm-and thus ready for optimal performance-when they consumed small doses of caffeine throughout the day. So skip the Venti French roast and try cups of tea (with its lower dose of caffeine) throughout the day. And have a small high carb snack at the same time: it seems that glucose and caffeine together clear your head better than either does alone. The sacrifices you have to make to keep alert!

I met with two top executives this morning. One of the participants runs a small creative agency. Another manages a manufacturing company 1000 times bigger. One is a man, the other a woman. One has seemingly unlimited resources, the other has to scrape for every dime. Here are some of the results of the meeting:

• one left the meeting with a plan to rearrange top management to make the company more responsive, quicker to market, and more innovative. “We’ve been doing things the same way for years. I feel like this is going to really open up the future for us.”
• one left the meeting with three things to do immediately to re-energize and re-engage employees. “I’ve been worrying about this for over a year. This is the first time I feel like I know what to do.”
• one left the meeting with a plan to identify, recruit, evaluate, and reward employees based on behaviors and attitudes vital to the company’s success. “This is something I’m going to put in place right now, It completely changes how I think about my business.”
• one left the meeting with an idea worth tens of thousands of dollars over the next year. “I can’t believe I never thought of this.”
  

Can you guess who’s who?

It doesn’t matter. You don’t get fresh ideas from people who are just like you. You get them from people who are different. It always matters who is in the room, but maybe not in the way you think.

When leaders work together to help each other succeed, good ideas come from surprising places.

The average retailer spends about 10% of its Internet marketing budget on email, even though email is by far the best marketing value online. According to a study by Forrester Research for Shop.org, it costs an average of $71.89 to get an order using banner ads, $26.75 using paid search, and $17.47 through affiliate programs. Each order costs only $6.53 using email sent to a company’s customer email list.

That’s the average. But fashion retailer Barney’s has increased response to its email campaigns tenfold by 1) using simpler messages–featuring one product per email rather than 10 or 12, and 2) carefully mining existing data from its web site to target offers to the right buyers.

What if you’re not in retail? The same approach may pay off for you.

• some non-retailers may have a better sense of how to target specific offers to the right customers.
• some non-retailers may have smaller customer email lists, thus reducing costs.
• everyone can benefit from simple offers targeted to the right customers.

If you’re not using email as part of your online marketing, give it a try. You may improve your return and reduce your spend.

Read all about it in Fast Company.

Everyone I talk to says the economy is their biggest challenge right now. Then I met Steve. Steve owns four small companies in the outdoor sports equipment industry. He has identified precise niches and he holds a leading position in two of them He sees the economic slowdown as a great opportunity.

“When customers are spending less across an industry, most everyone loses revenue, and most everyone reacts in the wrong way. They cut costs, they lay off people, they do anything they can think of to reduce expenses and maximize margins. That creates opportunities for me.” What will Steve do? He plans to acquire his biggest competitor, hire some new key people (who used to work for other companies), and steal customers from businesses that have weakened their positions by cutting too much.

Not all of us can afford to buy out a competitor right now. So what can we learn from Steve?

• Some of your competitors will lose customers when they close locations, cut back on customer service, reduce marketing efforts. Go get those customers!
• A lot of great people are looking for work right now. That makes it a good time to get the key people you’ve been looking for. Look to hire the people you need to grow. They’re out there now.
• Your employees are worried about how slow times will affect them. You don’t want them brooding. Re-engage your staff by put them to work devising ways to strengthen the business. Make it clear that you want to emerge from slow times stronger than ever and you need their help to do it.
  

In short, if you want to make the most of opportunities created by a slow economy, don’t think about how you’re going to survive the slowdown, focus on how you’re going to come out of it in a stronger position than ever.

Forget thinking outside the box. Think outside your brain.

Andy Clark poses an interesting problem in Natural Born Cyborgs. A guy asks a woman on the street, “do you know what time it is?” She says, “Yes, I do.” She then looks quickly at her watch and says, “It’s 10:22.”

Is the woman telling the truth when she says she knows the time? I’m inclined to agree with Clark that she is.

But here’s the problem. A teacher asks his class, “Who knows the capital of Albania?” One student says, “I do.” He gets up, excuses himself, leaves the room, walks to the library reference section, and starts opening books. Forty-five minutes later, he walks back in the room and announces, “It’s Tirana.”

Is the student telling the truth when he says he knows the capital of Albania? most people would think he’s not.

Suppose someone asked you, “Do you know the Capital of Albania?” and you said, “Yes. It’s Tirana.” We’d probably all agree that you know the capital of Albania. You have the appropriate fact stored somewhere in your brain, and you can quickly reproduce it on demand. That’s what knowing something means, isn’t it?

Sure it is. And yet, I’m still inclined to agree that the woman who needs to glance at her watch knows what time it is. With Clark, I’d argue that it’s fair to say that you know the answer to a question if you know how to locate that answer quickly, whether you you have to look inside your own brain or elsewhere.

After all, it does take time to retrieve an answer from your brain. And sometimes it takes longer than others. If I were asked, “What’s the capital of Romania?” I might have to think for a moment or two before coming up with Bucharest. These days, I might even have to think a bit longer than a moment or two. But I’d get it in the end. And I think that should count as knowing, don’t you?

So if it’s not the fact that it takes some time to retrieve the answer that determines whether someone knows something or not, can it be that you have to get it from your own brain to count it as knowledge? That just doesn’t make sense to me. I believe, like Clark, that our minds extend beyond our brains. We ought to recognize that and take advantage of it.

Seth Godin had an interesting short post oh his blog yesterday. Here it is:

Small business success

Three things you need:

• the ability to abandon a plan when it doesn’t work,
• the confidence to do the right thing even when it costs you money in the short run, and
• enough belief in other people that you don’t try to do everything yourself.

That’s it. Short and sweet and pretty hard to argue with.

For many business owners and CEOs, the last point is the hardest. That’s because Americans love cowboys.

One of our strongest national myths is the story of the cowboy, the rugged loner who rides into town and saves the day. It permeates our literature, our films, our music. (Remember, not all cowboys wear cowboy hats). And it’s really dangerous and misleading.

Most good things aren’t accomplished by lone individuals, though we tend to believe otherwise. People usually can’t change the world all by themselves, though we’d like to believe they could.

And let’s not forget the horrible cost to the cowboy. Shane walks away in the end. The lone hero has to remain alone.

You may be the boss, and that may mean that, in some sense, you’re responsible for everything. It doesn’t mean you have to do everything. If you try, you’re probably going to hurt yourself and your company.