How Smart People Buy New Cars
New Vehicles are a commodity and should be bought and sold as such. Dealers will try to convince you otherwise and will use lots of sales tricks to get you to buy from them. Don’t let them fool you. You should make the dealers compete with each other to give you the best price possible, […]
Liars Poker by Michael Lewis
“Wall Street,” reads the sinister old gag, “is a street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other.” This is striking but incomplete. It omits the kindergarden in the middle. -Frederick Schwed Jr.
Liars Poker by Michael Lewis is not only a fantastic picture of the nature of investment […]
What It Means When the Fed Changes Interest Rates
The Federal Reserve has been changing “interest rates” over the past few months and most people I talk to don’t know what that means or how it works. Here is a simple explanation.
First, a basic understanding of commercial bank regulation is needed.
Banks are required to have a certain amount of reserves in the form of […]
Ad-Supported Napkins
Giving away things for free has proven to be a profitable business, when the ‘free stuff’ is supported by ads. A couple of days ago I stumbled upon a great new business startup that capitalizes on this idea.
Napads.com gives away free napkins to its approved list of high profile bars, lounges and nightblubs. The napkins […]
The American Anomaly: Stocks Don’t Always go up in The Long Run
Occasionally I will mark up really great articles I have read and make a note to go back and read them again. Usually these articles totally disrupt my worldview and will make me rethink old ideas. Today I went back into an old publication of the Economist and found a real gem.
It is conventional wisdom in […]
Malcolm Gladwell on TED: What We Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce
I have been listening to The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell on audio book this week. Gladwell is a masterful story teller, has written a few bestsellers including Blink and inspired the book Made to Stick. So, needless to say when I found his talk on TED today I was excited to hear […]
Lessons from Steve Jobs: The 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
In 2005 Steve Jobs gave the commencement address at Stanford University and in he told just three stories. It is one of the most insiprational speeches I have ever heard, and it comes from a guy who has changed the way the entire world operates. What is fascinating is not that he made mistakes (like […]
How To Have Smarter Children
Scientific America reports on a series of studies that test two theories on intelligence and the results are very actionable. The first theory on intelligence is that people are just born smart. The second is that brilliance is a learned trait.
Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes […]
Literature, Moral Leadership and Harvard Business School
Following up on my last post on literature, leadership and billionaires, I found a relevant interview in the latest Working Knowledge from HBS. The interview is with Sarah Jane Gilbert, a faculty member at Harvard Business School, who recently developed a new course on moral leadership. What’s so interesting about this course is that it […]
What Billionaire Business Titans are Reading and Why Poets Make Better Leaders
Page one of Today’s Wall Street Journal has a fascinating story about Phil Knight, the founder and now chairman, of Nike, Inc. And what’s so interesting about Mr. Knight has little to do with how he built the industry titan Nike, or about his time as CEO. Last spring, the billionaire businessman nonchalantly sat in […]
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