• Men often falling stars…

    Men Often Falling Stars, Women Continue Shining Brightly. Why?  In February’s Harvard Business Review is a follow-up article stirring a bit of a backlash among men not taking the time to read. The controversy? About four years ago Boris Groysberg published an article (The Risky Business of Hiring Stars) noting that for most companies hiring away a……

  • The Existential Necessity of Midlife Change

    The Existential Necessity of Midlife Change So you think 50 is getting up there? Ready for the decline? Not any more. Average life expectancy in the US now hovers near 80, and for many of us, these become their most productive years. At 50 you’ve discovered your strengths, are comfortable in your skin, have learned……

  • A jigsaw puzzle

    A jigsaw puzzle? A broken swastika? A toileting monkey? These press descriptions of Wolff Olins’ 2012 London Olympics’ $800,000+ logo all express disappointment or worse. Sir Patrick Cox, the creative director for Wolff Olins explains that, “London won the 2012 bid when Paris and New York were the clear favorites…by saying the Olympic brand needed……

  • The Problem With Speed-Reading

    Do you tend to scan or speed-read through material to figure out what it’s all about? Go straight to the Executive Summary, then stop? You might be saving time, but you may be missing out on some of the most interesting content. In the 2001 DNA-sequencing race between the the government and Craig Venter’s Celera Genomics, victory was declared……

  • The bulk of time

    …the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to “problems” rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results. Peter Drucker in Managing for Business Effectiveness, 1963

  • The Topple Rate: How Fast Do Leading Companies Fall?

    Patrick Viguerie, a McKinsey & Co. consultant, has developed what he calls the Topple Rate: a measure of how many market-leading companies lose that status during the next five years. In the early 1970s, he says, it was about 8%. By the 1997-2002 period, it had climbed to 16%. Rigorous data for the past few……

  • Product Map, The Wealth of Nations, and Innovation

    Product Map, The Wealth of Nations, and Innovation. The economic growth of poor and developing countries is dependent upon their ability to move from their first successful product to the next. Recent research revealed that traditional economic theory linking success to factors such as transportation networks or the availability of skilled/non-skilled labor is wrong. Conventional economic……

  • The original LOLcats source

    The original LOLcats source, the founder of this web site lost his job. In diligently searching the web for his next option, he saw this photo that he thought was, well, just very funny. He built a web site around the photo and more like it. With over 200,000 daily hits a huge community participates, and new lines of jokes continue to……

  • Propaganda 1882 – Gauchos

    Fun Ads, But Will They Work? The quirky series of video ads for 1882 (Gauchos here), an herbal digestif in Argentina, is very entertaining and offbeat. Will they work though? Or will they suffer the fate of many Superbowl commercials, with people remembering the ads, but not what they’re for? (Source: http://www.youtube.com/)