Sales
In 1957, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders told America that supermarkets had hired motivational researchers to slow shoppers’ eye-blink rates from 32 a minute to 14 in the cereal aisle — a “hypnoidal trance” said to lift impulse buys by a third, and the panic it set off drove the first federal scrutiny of subliminal selling
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 30, 2026
When Ed Catmull instituted the Braintrust at Pixar in the late 1990s, the rule was that the assembled directors could critique any film in development but had zero authority to mandate changes — Catmull argued that the moment feedback carried power, honest feedback would disappear from the room within one meeting
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 30, 2026
When Warren Buffett bought Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, it was a failing New England textile mill — he later called the purchase the worst trade of his life and estimated the decision to use it as his holding company instead of starting fresh cost shareholders roughly $200 billion in compounded returns
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 30, 2026
As company lore tells it, a worker at Procter & Gamble’s Cincinnati factory left a soap-mixing machine running through lunch in 1879 — the air-whipped batch floated in customer washbasins, complaints arrived asking for more of the floating soap, and Ivory’s ’99 and 44/100 percent pure’ campaign was built on what looked like a mistake
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 30, 2026
Growth
When Rollin King and Herb Kelleher sketched the Southwest Airlines route map on a cocktail napkin at the St. Anthony Club in San Antonio in 1966, the three-city triangle between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio was chosen because Texas law let intrastate carriers avoid federal price regulation — the loophole let Southwest charge half what competitors did
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 30, 2026
Technology
When Shigeru Miyamoto designed Donkey Kong in 1981, Nintendo of America had 2,000 unsold Radar Scope cabinets sitting in a warehouse — Miyamoto’s team shipped only the new circuit boards and bezels from Japan, and a six-person crew including Minoru Arakawa and his wife Yoko gutted the cabinets by hand in Redmond, Washington to save Nintendo from bankruptcy in its first US year
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 30, 2026
Business
Before Ferrero shipped a single jar of Nutella in 1964, founder Pietro Ferrero invented the spread in 1946 as a solid loaf called Giandujot because postwar Italian cocoa rations were too scarce for chocolate — Piedmontese mothers sliced it onto bread for their children, and the company reformulated it into a spread when summers melted the loaves on grocery shelves
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 30, 2026
Why some high performers feel emptier after a promotion than before — the milestone often arrives without the identity it was supposed to deliver
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 30, 2026
All Articles by Richard Davis
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 30, 2026
In 1888, Asa Candler bought the Coca-Cola formula from a bankrupt Atlanta pharmacist for $2,300 and started handing out coupons for a free glass of Coke — by 1913 one in nine Americans had redeemed one, and the giveaway built the first national brand before refrigeration existed
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 30, 2026
Frederick Smith wrote the business plan for Federal Express as a Yale economics paper in 1965 and reportedly received a C — eight years later, with the company unable to cover Monday’s jet-fuel bill, he flew to Las Vegas with the last $5,000 in the corporate account and won $27,000 at blackjack to keep the planes flying
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 30, 2026
Andy Grove walked into Intel’s Santa Clara headquarters on a Monday morning in 1985 and asked co-founder Gordon Moore what a new CEO would do if they were brought in — Moore said exit the memory business — so Grove walked them both out the door and back in to do exactly that
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 29, 2026
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he cut the product line from 350 SKUs to 4 inside a single boardroom meeting by drawing a two-by-two grid on a whiteboard labeled consumer, pro, desktop, portable — the company was 90 days from bankruptcy and posted a profit within the next fiscal year
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 29, 2026
Margaret Hamilton coined the term ‘software engineering’ in the mid-1960s while leading the team that wrote the Apollo Guidance Computer code — when the lunar module’s processor overloaded three minutes before Armstrong landed in 1969, her priority-scheduling system shed the lower-priority tasks and kept the descent program running
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 29, 2026
Adi Dassler’s handmade spikes helped Jesse Owens win four golds in Berlin, then the German cobbler’s family workshop split into Adidas and Puma after a feud that divided a Bavarian town
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 26, 2026
Anna Jarvis founded Mother’s Day to honor one mother, then spent decades fighting the card, flower, and candy industries that turned her private tribute into a commercial machine
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 26, 2026
People who replay conversations for hours afterward aren’t always overthinking — they may be processing social information their nervous system flagged as unresolved
Tweak Your Biz Editorial Team June 25, 2026
