Sometimes crowds aren’t wise
I like Surowiecki’s book, a lot, and I have experienced many instances where the collective judgment of a group was far better than even an informed individual. But the “wisdom of crowds” catchphrase...
View Article3rd Annual Top 5 HBR Breakthrough ideas
… in which we winnow down Harvard Business Review’s yearly list of 20 breakthrough ideas to a manageable 5. 1. The Business of Biomimicry, by Janine M. Benyus and Gunter A.M. Pauli. Many of the most...
View ArticleFrom the Mistake Bank: Ken Lewis’“Taking that much bailout money was a...
Since I’ve been working on The Mistake Bank, I’ve kept a sharp eye out for public mistake stories. Many have found their way into blog posts and really have added to the first-person stories users have...
View ArticleTime to “unload the guns” with the finance industry
I took a very good sales training class a number of years ago. The instructor was a French-Canadian guy (let’s call him Jacques) who used lots of interesting expressions, including “platform speaker.”...
View ArticleDuncan Watts: “If it’s too big to fail, it’s too big”
(Funny, my wife made this point months ago.) Duncan Watts, principal research scientist at Yahoo Research and expert on human networks and complexity, makes this point in the June Harvard Business...
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Customers are talking: the stories of credit-card customers
There’s a great post over at Verbatim, the Communispace blog, by Karen Barone, discussing a project she did some years ago interviewing customers who had stopped paying their credit card bill. A major...
View ArticleRisk is risk – the specter of cybertheft
Welcome to a new category of posts. My 2010 goal (resolution?) is to post each Monday on the impact of risk on businesses small and large. My recent vacation reading included a daily dose of USA Today....
View ArticleNuts & bolts: a simple collections procedure
[Nuts & Bolts is a new category focusing on basic business practices for the entrepreneur or established business. Look for new Nuts & Bolts posts approximately weekly.] I saw my brother-in-law...
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Risk is risk: an idea for spotting emerging asset bubbles
One of the causes of the recent financial meltdown was a bubble in the value of housing assets that emerged over a number of years. Some people saw this while it was happening, but could do little to...
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