Turn customers into true believers

Owning a business means being the decider-in-chief on countless issues large and small. But how exactly do people make decisions? You can gain some insight from Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide, which explores the neuroscience of choice using true accounts of people who made agonizing decisions - and mostly got them right. Lehrer is especially good at mining academic research for vivid anecdotes that reveal how we balance reason and emotion in the decision-making process.

The advice at the end of How We Decide isn't altogether coherent, but the message boils down to something Freud once said: "When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves."

NEXT: Self-Promotion 101