The Location-Based Guide to Business

More evidence that location does correlate to personality types comes from a big study about personality traits led by Jason Rentfrow of the University of Cambridge, was recently published, showing that personality tendencies relate to location.

Richard Florida, the thinker who's latest book, "Who's Your City?" (see my review, Find Your Place in The Economy), dovetails with this new study, reproduced the agreeableness map in his Geography of Personality post. He also includes links to a PDF of the research paper and to a number of blogs that commented on the study.

In other words, hire your customer support people from places like Nebraska and the Dakotas, home to sociable folks. Okay, that's facetious -- not every Nebraskan will be friendly, any more than all New Yorkers are neurotic. But it may be worth locating call centers in a region that tends to have sociable people.

Michael Fitzgerald

Michael Fitzgerald writes about innovation and other big ideas in business for publications like the New York Times, The Economist, Fast Company, Inc. and CIO. He’s worked as a writer or editor at Red Herring, ZDNet, TechTV and Computerworld, and has received numerous awards as a writer and editor. Most recently, his piece on the hacker collective the l0pht won the 2008 award for best trade piece from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. He was also a 2007 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science and Religion.

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