Recently, Maia Bittner tweeted about the top three things people want to know about you, using Google’s search suggestions. This inspired me to check what came up for “Matt Wallaert” and then be subsequently horrified that my marital status is apparently more important than my work on behavioral science. After some contemplation, however, I decided […]
A few weeks ago, I got into a discussion on Twitter about why more men did not attend gender-focused events. In the world we want to live in, men recognize that they benefit from privilege and actively address it. In the world we do live in, change has been slow and male involvement low, which […]
I have discovered, over the years, that I’m a spectrum thinker. On white boards and bar tables and with wild air gestures, I always seem to be explaining how there are two opposing endpoints and why I’m only interested in this or that part of the area between them. So it is perhaps unsurprisingly that […]
Earlier this week, I bombed a talk at the Professional Convention Management Association’s Education Conference. This is actually fairly rare for me: because I love the science, it is normally easy for me to talk fluently and authentically. This week, though, I just couldn’t get it together. So I’m going to do something I try […]
Recently I’ve been working to evangelize the use of behavioral science in business, which often means working my network to get to the top levels of companies so I can do a bit of evangelism. And in doing so, I’ve learned something interesting: I don’t know corporate leaders. I don’t even know people who know […]
One of the most consistent questions I’ve been asked over the years is where to find good product people (a term I use because nobody can seem to decide if they are product managers, project managers, or some other exotic variant). Most companies recognize the value that a highly-skilled product person can bring, so they […]
It is a strange time to be a behavioral scientist in business. When I left my PhD program almost ten years ago to focus on real-world applications, I spent the majority of my first few years explaining over and over what behavioral scientists actually did. Now, I regularly get inbound requests to speak at large […]
At coffee with a male friend, I was talking about a female colleague that he really wants to work with. He was reviewing his pitch with me and he kept emphasizing his ability to bring her hard problems to solve. “That’s great,” I replied, “but she’s really more interested in doing original research on new […]
At Microsoft, one of the common cultural tropes was that no meeting ever started on time; being perpetually late was an accepted norm. And while plenty has been written about productivity loss and respect and all the other downsides of being late to a meeting, I want to talk about something slightly different. I’d like […]
It feels like every few years, the startup community figures out that they have a shortage. First it was engineers, then product people, then UX, and lately everyone has been coming to me asking if I know any good salespeople. Now that might be the result of the rise in enterprise software but even SMB […]