Another experiment analyzed a competition in which entrepreneurs pitched business ideas to a group of executives. Each participant presented their plan to the group; the group then selected and ranked the most promising plans for recommendation to an outside group of angel investors. Pentland found that the sociometers—which tracked only the cues exchanged by presenter and audience and ignored all the informational content—predicted the rankings with nearly perfect accuracy. In other words, the content of the pitch didn’t matter as much as the set of cues with which the pitch was delivered and
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