Have you seen this story? Our Boston leadership (and I use the term loosely) is once again promoting terror, fear, and ineptitude, in one happy package. An MIT student had a "bomb hoax" on her shirt. "Hoax" implies she was trying to pull one over on the police. No,...
Business
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Fewer finance jocks are attending business school. GOOD!
An article in the New York Times says that fewer finance jocks are attending business school. All I can say is: Good! In fact, it's good for everyone. The Wall Street jockies whose only real interest is in making a buck can go make their money unimpeded by anything...
Remembering everyone else who died on 9/11/2001
Today is September 11, 2007. There are plenty of people out today, celebrating the firefighters, rescure workers, and World Trade Center denizens who lost their life in the terrorist attack of 9/11. My friend from business school, Andy Kates, was one of those. The...
Idiotic business policy of the week goes to … Verizon Wireless!
I canceled a Verizon Wireless account before the end of my contract, incurring a $200 penalty. No problem. I was fine with that. I went to the web site to pay my final bill. "Web site temporarily unavailable. Try back later." it said, after I entered my username and...
Caught off-guard by the CEO? Try integrity. You might like it.
I was just reading a blog post on David Maister's BLOG (David is one of the world's experts on managing professional service firms) about a time he was caught off guard when a CEO publicly questioned his integrity. How should he have responded? What he did was to...
Business School is a thought virus
I've been doing a lot of examine-your-own-thoughts work in recent months. Sometimes, it seems like a good idea to re-examine unquestioned assumptions and stories to find out whether they're actually doing you any good. For example, there's a wonderful story in...
Wow. Does anyone really believe scripted friendship is sincere?
shudder I just called Crowne Hotels to make a hotel reservation. Then I called back to make a slight change. Both times, the account rep greeted me with a chipper, "What is your name so I may have the pleasure of serving you today?" While they sounded friendly, that...
Is being nice worthwhile?
I just had this exchange of answer/email/response on LinkedIn on the topic of: should you be nice? The original question: Is there power in being nice, with people in general or as a management tool?I'm reading the new book "The Power of Nice" because it was sent to...
The 11th Hour: What would the economic system look like?
I just saw The 11th Hour, Leonardo DiCaprio's new film about the state of the planet and what it will take for us to clean things up. It's the first such movie I've seen that actually presents the start of a vision of the kind of world we'll need to create. One...
Cooking the numbers, nationally, to present a tasty inflation report
I was just reading an article in the Boston Globe about the trade deficit hitting a 4-month low when I stumbled across these two paragraphs: In a second report, inflation at the wholesale level jumped sharply in July, rising by 0.6 percent, far above the 0.1 percent...