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...
Top ten lists on blogs often represent cynical efforts to get more traffic. They may make a few good points, but mostly spout pablum. But there are good ones. The newspaper management guru Jill Geisler has assembled a list of Ten Things Great Bosses Know that draw from columns she's...
Earlier this year I reviewed Silicon Dragon, which gives us a look at China's high-tech industry and tries to see which of them will become the Chinese counterparts to Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar and the Google boys. Think of them as Chinese entries into the business Olympics....
Downturn? Upturn! It might sound like the PBS version of how the top-floor management tries to bewitch what's left of the rest of the company into being happy about the latest restructuring. But it could also be a sound plan for a firm that would otherwise simply flounder under...
So, are the best business books of all-time worth reading? Steven "Freakonomics" Levitt says maybe not. In his latest column in the NYT, From Good to Great to Below Average, he talks about finally getting around to reading Jim Collins' "Good to Great." ...
BusinessPundit has assembled a list of the 25 Best Business Books ever. It's a good list, though it's a head-scratcher to see "In Search of Excellence" as its top choice, especially with the criticisms that book has faced over the years, since almost every...
Mentoring done right gives companies a powerful tool for developing employees, something most companies don't do much of anymore. BNET's How to Start a Mentorship Program offers a good jumping-off point. It sugarcoats in a few places -- for instance, top executives must be champions of...
I was catching up on Sean Silverthorne's excellent blog and found this link to a post by Scott Berkun on Why Innovation is Overrated. Berkun makes a few reasonable points -- most people don't talk about 'innovation' in everyday conversation. Where it does get used, it's done...
800CEORead posted a roundup of reviews of business books in major business magazines, covering The Economist, Portfolio, Business Week and Fortune. The two most promising seem to be William J. Bernstein's "A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World" and Richard J. Elkus Jr.'s "Winner Take All:...
Is Wall Street's manage-to-the-numbers approach the reason we're in the economic mess we're in? That's the argument of Gresham's Law and the Shaky Nature of Today's Business Ethics on the Slow Leadership blog. Gresham's Law, it tells us, is a 16th century maxim that 'bad' money (with...
In a move that's either completely self-aggrandizing or wildly enthusiastic, Tom Peters gives two thumbs up all by himself to Leadership the Hard Way, by Dov Frohman. Either way, it's obvious from his post, Believe It or Not: An Original Take on Leadership that he likes the book, which...
Just in time for the home stretch of summer, Joe Nocera of the New York Times a paper I sometimes write for has posted his list of the the best business books ever Nocera has been a top business writer for decades now -- for instance, his story...
Might the bailout of the week strategy in vogue in Washington be simply irrational behavior on an institutional level? I hinted at this in Peeling Away the Economic Onion. I ran across this Shankar Vedantam column in the Washington Post, Taking More Risks Because You Feel...
The Onion has a cunning bit of satire, Recession-Plagued Nation Demands A New Bubble To Invest In , that offers a welcome bit of relief from the oppressive sense of doom that pervades most financial news right now. A sample bit: ...
Slacker Manager has a weak post on telecommuting, 8 Tips on How to Work From Home: 28 Years of Experience, by David Zinger . It's really more like eight thoughts. Only two seem like tips to me -- the rest are observations or benefits based...
Resilience is one of the most important traits a successful human can have. It can also work for business brands, argue Booz Allen Hamilton consultants Nikhil Bahadur and John Jullens in strategy+business more or less a Booz house organ. In New Life for Tired Brands, they start with a mini-study...
Maggie Jackson's book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age," is getting real buzz. I got this subject line in my email yesterday: Are You Feeling Distracted? (My first thought: just about every minute of the day.) Are you feeling saturated...
In a fun and mind-turning essay, Michael T. Kanazawa argues People Don't Hate Change, They Hate How You're Trying To Change Them It starts out with a cold slap in the face: "According to a summary of over 40 research studies on change, the success rate of...
ChangeThis has an excerpt from "Chindia Rising:How China and India Will Benefit Your Business," by Jagdish N. Sheth. If the excerpt provides a model for the whole book, the writing is slightly jarring, like the name 'Chindia' itself. Many of the assertions seem overstated. Sheth argues for...
One of the most interesting emerging ideas in business today is tapping into user communities for innovative ideas. Open source software offers a prime example of this sort of citizen innovation (a phrase I may be stealing from someone, but if so, it's inadvertent). Software isn't the only...
The ominous sounding "The Quandary of a Superpower As Others Race to Catch Up" yields a lovely, concise "compare and contrast" review of two books about America's future in Sunday's New York Times. Reviewer Stephen Kotkin summarizes and analyzes "The Return of History and the End of Dreams," by the...
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...
