One
Last week a workmen’s café in the small town of Bourges in France was flooded with phone calls from customers wanting to book tables. It happened after Michelin, the company that publishes highly influential restaurant guides, awarded it with a prestigious star. Imagine how astonished reporters and prospective customers were when they turned up at an inexpensive eatery with plastic tablecloths. A Michelin Guide representative soon phoned the owner to apologise. It turned out that they had confused the café with a more refined establishment of the same name and a similar address, located near Paris.



Two
In the U.S. about 30 million children take part in some form of organized sporting events and suffer from 3.5 million injuries each year. According to surveys, approximately one third of all the injuries which occur in childhood result from doing sports, and by far the most common are sprains and strains. Obviously, some sports are more risk-prone than others. I’m sure that contact sports like football carry a higher risk of injury than non-contact sports such as swimming. Interestingly, a recently published large-scale study has revealed that, regardless of the type of sport we do, the majority of injuries occur due to overtraining.



Three
Imagine a seminar attended by 50 people, during which they are taken to a room full of balloons and told to find the balloon with their name written on it within 5 minutes. Usually you’d expect everyone to be frantically searching for the right balloon, pushing each other; some might even get hurt in the process. However, I decided to apply a different method. I instructed people to randomly pick up a balloon and shout the name written on it. The owner would then step forward to collect their balloon. This way, within minutes everyone had their balloons. If you want your team to work efficiently, it’s crucial to select the most effective method of coping with a job. Why not carry out both variants of this experiment? Make sure your employees can see the difference!