This week is all about temptations ( click on the link to spot the #DadJoke).
To the extent that I can, this newsletter will frame our leadership work through the lens of Jewish tradition (hence the “Judaism” in Moneyball Judaism).
And following Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, you may find that after reading several issues of this newsletter, you learned something new and started thinking about how you could apply these tools to your work. Hayom Harat Olam!1
And like most New Year’s resolutions, there is a high likelihood that you will pursue your goals for a short while and quickly give up…
I know, depressing.
But since leadership starts from within, if you are not able to transform yourself, then it is unlikely that you will transform anyone else, and even less likely you’ll transform an organization.
“Josh, do you have any good news this Sunday morning?”
“Patient, young grasshopper.”
And with that, let’s make you feel guilty for not going to the gym more…
(See what I did there?)
Big Idea: Temptation Bundling
Dr. Katy Milkman thinks more people should go to the gym.
She’s spot on. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but pre-pandemic approximately 67% of gym memberships were never used, which translated into almost $400 million. It’s an incredible business model.
And by “incredible,” I mean “sketchy,” since the gyms know that most members will never show up when they sell them an expensive membership.2
But Dr. Milkman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania with joint appointments in medicine and business, wants to help people go to the gym more. So she ran an experiment where students at Penn were induced to go to the gym by being given popular audiobooks on an iPod3 they could only listen to while exercising. After the experiment, 61% of the participants opted to continue with the gym-only iPods due to the positive impact of this iPod on their exercise regimen.4
Milkman calls this “temptation bundling,” combining something you want with something you should do in order to achieve goals that seem out of reach (e.g. exercising more, managing time better, etc.). For example, Milkman found that if she only streamed her favorite television shows while at the gym, she would go to the gym more.5 In an interview with Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics, Milkman argues that
...you can actually have complementarities, which is an econ-speak term for peanut butter and jelly — two things that would go better together and are more enjoyable together than they would be separately. One of the neat things about…only allowing yourself to watch your favorite TV show while you’re at the gym, is the fact that you might actually enjoy your workout more, and you might enjoy the TV show more when you do them together.
As you think about the tools shared in this newsletter, it becomes critical to think about how you might use them. And as you can probably guess, it’s better to assume that it will be hard to do them and plan accordingly, rather than rest on good intentions, alone.6
Book Summary: Nudge
What Milkman is doing through temptation bundling is what Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call a “nudge,” also the title of their incredible book that inspired change around the world.
My favorite factoid: over twenty governments created “nudge units” to figure out how to improve lives through subtle changes. When I found out that a friend of my wife’s worked in a nudge unit, I was more excited than when I shook Cal Ripken Jr.’s hand at a book signing. Don’t judge me.
Thaler and Sunstein define a nudge as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives “(6).7
For example, when I make a charitable donation online, there is typically a box I can check to cover the transaction fees so that the organization can use 100% of my donation for their work. Should the organization leave the box unchecked as the default option, or leave it checked and give me the option of unchecking it?
The latter option is a nudge; I can uncheck the box if I want, but before I do that I need to decide if I want to, at which point I realize that it’s only a small increase in my donation. Classy, an online fundraising software platform, found that an organization would get almost 15% more donations by making a checked box the default option.
Here’s another nudge that I love: every website wants me to allow them to use “cookies” to track my internet usage. But when I went to the homepage of The Hadar Institute, I found this:
Get it, small cookie?8
Humor is also a nudge. I reject the request of most websites to use cookies, but when I went to Hadar’s, I laughed and thought, “Mad respect for the effort.”
Weekly Links
The New Art of Hybrid Gathering: Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering became a sensational bestseller before everyone began to confine themselves during the pandemic. Parker now offers insights into how to think about what it means to create a hybrid gathering, which will likely remain the trend for the foreseeable future (particularly in synagogues).
Bullish on Nudging: The nudging revolution of Thaler, Sunstein, Milkman, and others continues to grow. Here is a current piece on why the nudges continue to make a big difference. While some argue that nudges are too small to truly matter, the evidence suggests otherwise.
Salary Transparency: A number of Jewish organizations are doing exceptional advocacy work to push for all open positions in Jewish organizations to include a salary range. Here is a set of channels that aim to spread this transparency to the broader society.
The Fallacy of the 15%: Typically, nonprofits tell donors that only 15% of their gift or grant will go to operating expenses (i.e. “overhead”). However, research continues to grow that this industry standard is unrealistic and needs to be corrected.
Fortnite’s Launching of the Metaverse: Like said, I don’t get the metaverse, but I know it is important, and we will learn together. I found this article in The Washington Post to be a helpful introduction to the metaverse through the lens of Fortnite’s exceptional growth.
Translation: “Today is the Birthday of the World.”
You might be thinking to yourself, “Hey Josh, that sounds a lot like synagogue membership! Don’t most people pay dues to synagogues for services that they essentially use only a few times a year?” You are correct (sort of); the difference is that synagogues do not intentionally try and get people to join and never show up. Read this.
At what point do I need to explain to our younger readers what an iPod was?
Katherine L. Milkman, Julia A. Minson, Kevin G. M. Volpp, “Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym: An Evaluation of Temptation Bundling” in Management Science 60(2):283-299 (2013).
In the podcast, Milkman and Dubner call this “Gymflix.” In other news, why isn’t Milkman a billionaire for this incredible idea and name?
This is called “proactive pessimism” (originally called “defensive pessimism”).
By the way, Thaler and Sunstein make a point of saying that there is an important difference between the idea of a “nudge” and the Yiddish “noodge,” comforting every nice Jewish grandmother at synagogue who ever told me to tuck in my shirt or stand up straighter.
I Kings 17:13. Technically, the world in that sentence is עֻגָה, which is really “cake,” not “cookie.” But I don’t care. The nudge made me laugh.