Today’s LA Times asks a good question: Is Mark Zuckerberg in over his hoodie as Facebook CEO? Business writers Walter Hamilton and Jessica Guynn dig into an issue that I suspect some of us have seen before, and it’s remarkable that the clamor over Zuck specifically hasn’t been louder for some time. Should Mark Zuckerberg, the social media visionary but neophyte corporate
Read moreSome recent graduates of my alma mater, Wake Forest University, are up in arms over this year’s commencement speaker, former DISH Network chairman Charlie Ergen. They penned what struck me as a thoughtful, well-considered letter to university president Dr. Nathan Hatch, in which they chastised him for a pattern of pandering to business interests to the exclusion of those who
Read moreTricky Dick. Slick Willie. Toyota. Now … Apple? What the heck is so hard about the truth, especially when it’s clear that we live in a world where it gets harder and harder to lie and get away with it by the day. I may have mentioned my friend John Cavanaugh’s biz site, The Tap Tap Tap. John is too
Read moreThey say money can’t buy happiness. The same also goes for celebrity, and even the status that accompanies being among the best in the world at your profession. We’ve had ample demonstration of this in recent days. Robert Enke, the goaltender for Hannover 96 (who currently hover in the middle of the German Bundesliga standings) and a potential member of
Read morePrediction is a big, big business these days, and even those of us who aren’t explicitly in the prediction business probably do all we can to make sense of the future. For example: Does your company do marketing research? (If it’s a business of any size and sophistication, the answer is probably yes.) Do you track the financial pages? Do
Read moreEver since the Internet began gaining popular awareness in the mid-1990s, the topic of how businesses can productively use various new media technologies has been a subject of ongoing interest. Along the way we’ve had a series of innovations to consider: first it was the Net, and the current tool of the moment is Twitter. In between we had, in
Read moreOnce upon a time the business world was dominated by hierarchical organizations that derived both their structures and mechanistic management philosophies from military thinking that traces its lineage through Frederic the Great all the way back, literally, to the Roman legions. And by “once upon a time,” of course, I mean “at this very minute.” The truth is that way
Read moreHate meetings? Who doesn’t? Not that it isn’t important to get the right people together in a room to talk about important issues, but let’s face it, in most organizations (and by “most” I mean “virtually all”) the average meeting probably lasts longer than it needs to. When it does drag on too long, productivity takes a hit and we
Read moreWe can probably agree that it’s good to have goals. In business, especially, it’s good to know where you’re going and to have some mechanisms that help you chart and evaluate your progress. Increasingly, though, we’re presented with more and more evidence suggesting that our goal-setting can easily go awry, and with dramatically counter-productive results. If you’ve read Steven Levitt
Read moreAs the poet Robert Burns put it, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley.” The common military iteration of the sentiment says that no plan, however well devised, survives contact with the enemy. And former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson explained, in the least poetic fashion possible, that everybody’s got a plan until you bust him
Read moreI come from a family background that was conflicted on the question of education. On the one hand, my grandparents (who raised me from the time I was three) realized that whatever hope I was to have of a better life than they’d had hinged on school. As such, there was never a moment in my life, once I was
Read moreIt has been alleged that Scholars & Rogues is not, strictly speaking, a political blog. Sure, we write about overtly political issues and devote our share of time to things like media policy, energy and the environment, business and the economy, and international dynamics. Yes, we were credentialed to cover the DNC, but we don’t really do hard, insider, by
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lullaby pit 