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...

We are still in a financial pickle triggered by the subprime mortgage meltdown.

The mess is becoming clearer. What isn't clear is -- what the heck happened, and how did we get here in the first place?

First, the present.

Two excellent articles describe the situation as of 2007.

The...

From BusinessWeek comes the painful story of an idealist butting heads with resistance and inertia. Nominally it's a story of Green economics -- identifying ways to be profitable while reducing environmental impact.

But it's also about an emphasis on short-term economics that is not only paralyzing environmental activity, but is...

In a charming blogpost, Paul Duval says that developers should "Fire your best people and reward the lazy ones."

As he explains, developer shops often consider "troubleshooters" to be among the best employees. They know where all the hard-coded quick fixes are, and they can spot them like...

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with my old friend Fred. Fred was a campus radical back in the '60s. I'd only seen him a few times since.

He made good money working in Silicon Valley, but insisted on living in San Francisco, doing the reverse commute. "Southern...

I am hardly the first to note the application of PR principles to politics. Nor is it a new observation. Kennedy and Nixon had their communications advisors; Lincoln read books on rhetoric -- ancient Greeks wrote them.

We now see it in mind-numbing three-word phrases printed, Louis Vuitton-like, on backdrops...

The Harvard Business School Working Knowledge series has a track record of picking fascinating topics, even if I've occasionally accused them of over-analyzing the obvious. Not so in a current article.

Why We Aren't as Ethical as We Think We Are, by Tenbrunsel et al, is not only...

When you read that title, you probably chuckled cynically. It sounds like an oxymoron.

I think there's good reason for that. Not just in fact, but in principle, it is hard to square politics with trust. To trust politicians may be an exercise in pre-meditated resentment.

...

What do analyses of social networks and trust have in common with the subprime-mortgage credit crisis? Quite a bit, it turns out.

The NYTimes on Sept. 2, in "Can the Mortgage Crisis Swallow a Town?" introduces the Egglestons of Maple Heights, Ohio. They're a hardworking family trying to sell...

If you wanted a definition of trust, you could look it up in Webster's. Or perhaps in Wikipedia -- but it's kind of complicated.

Or, you could recognize that definitions are ultimately anthropological, and go straight for a source. Say, an editorial on Idaho's Senator-at-this-moment Larry Craig in...

The Dow swung 600 points (high to low) in two days this week -- and the week's not over.
Key stock market indices in Indonesia and South Korea lost over 6% of their total value yesterday alone. Seoul's Kospi Index had its biggest point drop ever.

Katie...

Ward's Automotive was for decades a major US auto industry trade publication. Each year, Ward's published a yearbook, with a one-page market share table near the center.

Each year the book detailed share stats for not just GM, but Chevrolet, and within Chevy, Impalas and BelAirs. Plymouths, Dodges, Ramblers all...

I'm reading A Demon of Our Own Design, by Richard Bookstaber. He did not cause the major market meltdowns of the last two decades, but -- as he puts it -- "let's just say I was in the neighborhood."

More on that book another time. There is one fascinating...