Archive
Listicle: Harvard Business Review Headlines That Sound Vaguely Porny, If You Think About It For A Few Seconds
How to Recover Your Core Rhythm
Yes, You Need More Gadgets
Yelp is Leaving Chains Behind
Hot Conflict Can Be Healthy, Even in China
The Ambidextrous CEO
Create Shared Value with a Trampoline Approach
A Female-Dominated Workplace Won’t Fix Everything
Need to Find a Job? Stop Looking So Hard
Getting Japanese Women Back on Track
Moving from Transaction to Engagement
Maintaining Physical, Social and Mental Fitness for Peak Performance
Stop Thinking Outside the Box
*All headlines pulled from @HarvardBiz tweets
AOL’s Patch, HBR, and sustainable local journalism
Last week, Maxwell Wessel posted an entry on the Harvard Business Review’s blog network critiquing AOL’s strategy for Patch, an experiment in local news aggregation that is currently a rather high-profile drain on the company’s coffers. I appreciate the thesis of the post: that rather than ignore or discard Patch, AOL should invest in it more intelligently.
What bugs me is that Wessel mentions the ostensible purpose of Patch—the gathering and reporting of news—exactly twice, both times subtly disparaging it. First, in characterizing Patch’s modus operandi:
“Patch’s current business model is unsustainable. Patch is building a network of journalists and salespeople, and it’s costing the company a lot. This is not the way to build a disruptive business and it’s an open question as to whether Patch must grow this way to win in local news. Patch doesn’t need to be spending money this way to win in the space.”
Pop culture is ready for its next favorite psychopath
This month’s GQ excerpts an essay from Jon Ronson’s new book The Psychopath Test, which examines the frightening likelihood that the subtly yet undeniably insane are prevalent in every area of society – especially in the upper echelons of power. Reading the piece – an intriguing mini-profile of a notorious corporate executive, “Chainsaw” Al Dunlop – motivated me to revisit two related texts that I’ve loved (though one of which I have
only the faintest memories of).
Buffett vs. Scott – The Tale of the Tape
The season finale of The Office, already stuffed to the gills with prayers for view-errr, I mean, guest stars, recently added investment mogul Warren Buffett to the roster of famous people who will jockey for the resume jewel of managing northeastern Pennsylvania’s most famous branch office. The Sage of Omaha is as hallowed a name as there is in American business, but he’s known primarily as a savvy investor rather than a leader of men and women. So how would he stack up against the man he’d be replacing, veteran manager Michael Scott? Let’s go to the tale of the tape:
Andrea Pallas Daglas 
Self-Interest ≠ Selfishness; A Brief Response to HBR
The current issue of Harvard Business Review features a somewhat frustrating piece by Yochai Benkler called “The Unselfish Gene.” It’s quite engaging in places, particularly when discussing some of the research regarding how context shapes people’s motivations, and in the resulting prescriptions for restructuring business environments to promote collaborative behavior. Unfortunately, the arguments are weakened by two fairly key misinterpretations central to his thesis.
Read more…