Why are entrepreneurs loved and CEO's hated? It's a bit of irony that has not been lost on me this past week as a bunch of cyber-strangers weighed in on their perception of me based upon a photo. Is this a crazy entrepreneur or a CEO who has lost his...

Unconscious Capitalism...we've witnessed that. Even Drunk Capitalism may sound more accurate than Conscious Capitalism. But, the truth is we can't afford to have Capitalism be anything but Conscious given the stakes involved and the power wielded by the world of business.

I've just come back from the 2nd annual...

As the world's leaders descended on the burg of Pitts, that rascal Sarkozy handed out a French-made pair of 3-D glasses. Upon the one-year anniversary of the financial meltdown, the French president suggested that we've been evaluating the financial world with one eye closed and have been distracted by the...

The Fed announced the obvious last week. They told us we're on a slow path of recovery and that the recession may be declared over this quarter based upon the fact that current economic indicators are a little less pathetic than they were last summer. But, they also told us...

Is there a silver lining in all of the pain and suffering associated with corporate America's downsizing diet? I had some time to consider this during a bucolic weekend on a Sonoma ranch.

I spent the last few days drinking exclusively organic grape juice and a variety of medicinal...

A is swallowing Z in a classic case of KC. Confused? In case you're just coming back from vacation, Amazon is acquiring the online shoe and apparel retailer Zappos for something between $850 and $925 million, a very handsome sum considering the depth of the recession we're in and how...

Two books collided upon my bedside table this week: Free - The Future of a Radical Price, and, Four Seasons - The Story of a Business Philosophy. The first book, written by my friend Chris Anderson (who is the Editor of Wired magazine and authored the recent bestseller, The Long...

I stumbled into my 25th Stanford Business School reunion over the weekend somewhat chagrined by the fact that my pockets are relatively empty a quarter of a century after I graduated from this august institution. I expected to feel small relative to the corporate titans who were my former classmates...

Close your eyes for a moment and consider the collection of bosses you've had since you joined the workforce. I remember my first boss, Mac, when I suffered through six week at the fries and shake work station of McDonald's. He helped me understand that "boss" was a four-letter word...

Can little Bhutan -- with its humanistic development philosophy -- create for a new global currency of well-being? For you skeptics who think innovation only occurs in the developed world, consider Bangladesh's Muhammad Yunus and his microlending approach to financing the aspirations of the poor. Yunus, who won the Nobel...

Born in the shadow of Disneyland, I have a natural predilection for seeking happy utopias. Having founded a company named Joie de Vivre in a place described as "49 square miles surrounded by reality" (San Francisco), I'm not surprised by my fascination with Bhutan, the first country in the world...

Who defines what you value? Of course, we would love to think that we alone define our own sense of value. But, it shouldn't surprise you to know that - on a global basis - our definition of what's important is incredibly influenced by statisticians and economists using the equivalent...

You can catch much worse than the flu at work. W. Edwards Deming, the father of the total-quality movement in business, once said that the primary duty of every leader is to remove fear from the workplace. Smart man. Today, our workplaces have become "fear factories," with an emotional contagion...

Admit it. We are in uncharted territory. We're spending more than a trillion dollars to prop up an economy that was overly-stimulated during the dot-com bubble and then propped-up again by the Fed during the real estate bubble. When Republicans are talking about nationalizing banks and the Obama administration is...

Fifty years ago, Abraham Maslow wrote, "Where fear reigns, enlightened management is not possible." More recently, the management consulting firm Accenture revealed the results of a study that showed that companies have "emotional fields" that can immunize them from the kind of fear that is plaguing most companies today. Accenture's...

For some reason, the fact that Barbie turned 50 this past week freaked me out. As a guy who's on the precipice of 48 and a half, I was already struggling with the reality that our President is younger than me. But, now I know that Barbie and I will...

Abe Maslow is probably turning over in his grave. The creator of psychology's most popularized theory of human motivation (the Hierarchy of Needs) would be shocked to realize that we've become utterly confused by the difference between wants and needs. During the four decades since Maslow passed away, modern man...

Modern man is a transient being. A small fraction of us live in the community in which we were raised. Similarly, what binds us together today isn't so much our externally-obvious demographics as it is our internally-connecting psychographics. In fact, the rise of Internet communities has more to do with...

Will it take an earthquake to shake American bankers from their new found windfall from the federal government? Congress approved the $700 billion TARP rescue plan months ago with the idea that these funds would help stimulate the economy by providing more capital to the banking industry which would ease...

What does it take to help you realize what you're worth? And, who determines what you're worth? Two simple questions, but they're so complex to answer.

Tragically, I'm not sure a Stanford MBA classmate of mine from 25 years ago, Erik, sat down and asked these questions. Erik ran...