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 […]
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 […]
Deceptive Advertisments, Why Maslow Was Wrong and How to Motivate People
Typically, when a marketer appeals to a person’s self interest, the advertisements that result are deceptive and schmucky.
The ads end up promising enormous benefits for minimal costs:
“You Can Laugh at Money Worries if You Follow This Simple Plan”
“Give Me Five Days and I’ll Give You a Magnetic Personality…Let me Prove It -Free”
“The Secret of How […]
Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman of AOL on Entrepreneurship
The latest issue of Knowledge at Wharton talks about Ted Leonsis, the keynote speaker at the recent Wharton Entrepreneurship conference. Leonsis started his first successful company at age 24 and later sold it for $60,000,000 and later he realized money was not the metric to measure success with, but rather how much good you are […]
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Last year I read the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. More than a year later I keep thinking about this idea. Here is an excerpt that explains this concept better than I could:
“Why are these things fun? Strangely enough, when we try to answer that question, it turns out that […]
20 Minutes: What Every City (and everyone online) Needs
Network news demands an hour of your time to get up to speed on the latest happenings, and the local paper takes at a minimum half of that. I don’t usually have that much time, which is exactly why I like the idea of 20 minutes so much. Here is what the company is all about:
“20 minutes is […]
Profile of Sam Zell in the New Yorker
There is a great article of Sam Zell in the New Yorker. Zell, who built and later sold the giant office REIT Equity Office Properties Trust shares many insights into his life. One of my favorites is his humor:
“Sam was the rainmaker, and Bob was the one that took care of all the messes Sam made,’ […]
Kiva.org Microloans
A couple of months ago I made two $25 loans on kiva.org. This week I received notice that both of the entrepreneurs have repaid 10% of the total loan commitment.
I am excited about this for a number of reasons. First, I have become convinced that micro credit is the best way to bring the third […]