It is tempting to dwell on the horror of Bernard Madoff. (Thanks to Robert Scheer for teeing up this issue). How could he have done it? What kind of a man does that? Is 150 years in prison enough? And so on.

Tempting--but largely wrong. If we lay all...

Dear Wall Street CEO:

You've been taking it on the chin lately. On the other hand, the only CEO Obama has fired recently came from my side of town--Main Street--so maybe you're not so bad off.

I have a proposition for you. For both of us, actually.

I, a Main...

R. Allen Stanford, head of Stanford International Bank, has been charged with fraud by the SEC.

Another day, another Ponzi scheme. Stanford's take: $8 Billion. Not chump change, of course, but neither does it put him in Madoff's league (up to $40 billion).

I think I shall call him mini-Madoff.

It's beginning to look like Bernie Madoff's business model had less in common with a hedge fund or investment management firm than it did with an online virtual reality game. Sort of a Sim City for investors. The money sent in was real: everything thereafter was from Oz.

Until now,...

Q. What do Mark Twain, Clint Eastwood and Bernie Madoff have in common?

A. They all tell tales of the path from mistrust to corruption.

In 1879, Harper's Monthly published Mark Twain's wry tale The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg -- a dark, cynical sketch of a town whose pride...

The Trust Equation describes the components of trustworthiness. The equation is:

T = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-orientation

Of course, any such recipe worth its salt will also serve as a template for reverse engineering--a "how-to" manual for a con man. Measuring Bernie Madoff by the trust...

I am not generally the dullest knife in the drawer, but when it comes to the subprime -- I mean credit, I mean whatever -- financial crisis, I often feel like one. I know a few facts, but can't put them together in a quite satisfactory way.

Fortunately, for my...

Bernard Madoff's Madoff Securities lost $50 Billion in an apparent Ponzi scheme.

You can read about the details anywhere--try the Wall Street Journal, for example. But the details don't answer one question.

How? How could some of the world's supposedly smartest investors -- hedge funds -- have been hoodwinked...

Toyota introduced the Prius in 1997. 11 thoughtful years later, GM brings us--the Hybrid Escalade.

This level of cluelessness--culminating in private CEO jet flights to Washington to beg for money--is hardly random. It took 50 years of really bad management to get here. Both bankruptcy and bailout offer...

Frank Capra's perennial Christmas movie It's a Wonderful Life is remembered mainly for celebrating civic and familial virtues. George Bailey sacrifices his dreams for those of others, but in the end receives the greatest rewards of all.

But George was also a good industrial economist. Reluctant inheritor of dad's Bedford...

Regulation is a social substitute for trust.

That's not a moral statement, just a factual one.

Sometimes it's obvious. We submit to the regulation of traffic laws because we can't trust everyone will simultaneously interpret the rules of the road similarly. And, when stoplights fail, we trust the regulation...

In a reprise of that old Trojan Horse trick the Greeks played, Yale Economist Robert J. Shiller suggests we reduce this country's wealth imbalance by educating the man on the street to not get fooled by Wall Streeters by paying Wall Street to teach him. Say what?

Shiller...

What do work-for-hire contracts, email disclaimers and spam have in common? They are all getting ubiquitous, annoying -- and ineffective.

Here's what I mean.

Trend #1: Business is moving from a vertical management model to a horizontal purchasing model. Consider benefits administration: once a department reporting to the...

As far as I know, John McCain has never sold for a living. Though you could argue that insofar as he's a politician, he's never done anything else.

Whether or not you believe all politicians are salespeople, some do it differently than others. McCain "sells" in a particular way.

It's...

What a kerfuffle!

The press anoints Obama in Iowa, then gets caught smirking by the re-ascendance of Queen Hillary in New Hampshire. Is the press getting its come-upance?

That's the story if you watch John Stewart lampooning Wolf Blitzer, Lou Dobbs and any network besides Comedy Central.

That's also...

I'm not alone in pointing out short-termism in American business. But it goes well beyond focus on stock prices and quarterly earnings reports. Short-termism is embedded in daily management practice, in ways we are often not aware of. I was reminded of this recently.

I spoke with a mid-level consultant...

It took the advertising industry about 150 years to get to the point of putting ads on the inside of bathroom doors. It took considerably less for the commercial vultures to zero in on the social network phenomenon. Except this time, it's an inside job.

First, MySpace. In July of...

On November 8, the Washington Speaker's Bureau booked a nice commission when former Prime Minister Tony Blair was paid $500,000 for a 20-minute talk to Chinese industry and government officials in Hong Kong.

Not a bad sum, even in US dollars. Blair's Chinese market rate is now 2X the...

Many years ago, I consulted to a Texas-based convenience store chain.

They had a 150% store manager turnover rate. They wanted to identify characteristics of higher-tenure store managers, so they could hire people who'd stay longer.

Turns out that they also administered lie detector tests every month to every store...

I spoke to the (non-American) former CEO of a large company--the profitability leader in its capital-intensive global industry.

"Why do American CEOs listen to 30-year old investment bankers?" he asked me. "They don't know anything."

"I used to get calls from them--Morgan Sachs, Goldman Stanley, you know--the supposed crème de...