I had lunch with a good friend the other day. It was her turn to buy and it made the sushi taste even better. But by far the conversation was the best part. I am not a degree bigot, but Donna Reganbaum reflects well on her Stanford undergrad and Harvard (pronounced “HAH-vahd”) MBA. She is the poster child for intellectual curiosity and lifelong learning. I always leave lunch with my head exploding AND a homework assignment. It nostalgically takes me back to office visits with Dr. Kamangar at UTA while working on myPhD.

This time, my homework was to investigate the Hawthorne effect. She was able to label something I had observed and exploited without knowing the underlying psychology. After doing my homework - I now understand the why as well as the what and when.

From Wikipedia - The Hawthorne effect describes a temporary change in behavior or performance in response to a change in environmental conditions. Others have broadened this definition to mean that people’s behavior and performance change (generally improve) following any new or increased attention.

In the 90’s I sold a bunch of firewalls to managers that needed to keep employees in check. “Surfing” during working hours reduced productivity substantially. By installing a system to track where people were going on the web while at work, peoples behavior changed.

I’d like to propose a corollary to Hawthorne. People’s behaviors change even when they only perceive that there is a change in environmental conditions - increased attention - even though it may not be the case.

Even if the manager never looked at the reports, the “Hawthorne Effect” is real.

This of course leads to all kinds of opportunities. One of the most interesting is the “Red Light” - devices. They detect people that run red lights. The most profitable provider of these systems is the one that sells many more “dummy” devices than real ones. Higher gross margin when there are no components inside.

Years ago I said that “m2m will be successful when nobody notices”. Well, that is true, but when everyone notices, m2m will provide ROI .