Scientific American 2013
How to Not Get Sidetracked
Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino shares the psychological secrets to finishing what you started.
By Gareth Cook on
There is an area of self-help devoted to advice on completing tasks… Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, also wants to help you achieve your goals...
In Sidetracked, she argues that to succeed we first need to know our enemy, the often-unconscious factors that stop us from getting things done. Then we can fight back. She answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
Why did you write this book?
Many of the ideas I study and write about are motivated by my personal experience and by what surrounds me –interesting patterns of behavior that often, at first glance, make little sense. Sidetracked focuses on situations where we set out to accomplish specific goals but ended up reaching different outcomes –outcomes we often regret...
In Sidetracked, I explain how… Most of us care a good deal about being consistent—we care about following through on our goals and wishes. And we also aim to behave in ways that are consistent with our self-image as capable, competent, and honest individuals.
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 2023
A Dishonesty Expert Stands Accused of Fraud.
Scholars Who Worked With Her Are Scrambling.
ILLUSTRATION BY THE CHRONICLE; IMAGE FROM TEDXTRENTOSTUDIO, YOUTUBETo Maurice E. Schweitzer, a University of Pennsylvania business professor, it seemed logical to team up with Francesca Gino, a rising star at Harvard Business School. They were both fascinated by the unseemly side of human behavior — misleading, cheating, lying in order to profit — and together, they published eight studies over nearly a decade.
Now, Schweitzer wonders if he was the one being deceived.
Gino is on administrative leave from Harvard amid allegations that research she co-authored contains fabricated data, as The Chronicle reported last Friday. The next day, a trio of academics wrote on their blog that they’d found “evidence of fraud” in four of her papers, which they said Harvard was seeking to have retracted. But “we believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data,” they added, without specifying. “Perhaps dozens.”
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