Commentaries

Nate Silver Is a One-Man Traffic Machine for the Times

November 13, 2012

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Marc Tracy and published by The New Republic magazine. To read the complete article, please click here. * * * “FiveThirtyEight is drawing huge traffic,” New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson…

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Lest we forget this Veteran’s Day….

November 10, 2012

During its first 100 years of existence, more than 683,000 Americans lost their lives, with the Civil War accounting for 623,026 of that total (91.2%). Comparatively, in the next 100 years, another estimated 625,000 Americans died through two World Wars…

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Russell L. Ackoff on “cleaning up messes”

November 10, 2012

In Redesigning the Future: Systems Approach to Societal Problems published by John S. Wiley & Sons (1974), Russell L. Ackoff provides a number of valuable insights when discussing the challenges that leaders face, notably coping with complexities and frustrations created…

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Congratulations, Mr. President. Now Comes the Hard Part.

November 9, 2012

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Michael Watkins for the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click…

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And the winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2012 is…

November 9, 2012

Steve Coll’s Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, published by Penguin Press and Allen Lane. The book is a hard-hitting investigation of the notoriously secretive ExxonMobil Corporation, beginning with the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 and closing with the Deepwater…

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“It Don’t Cost Nuthin’ to be Nice” Paul (Bear) Bryant

November 8, 2012

The way I heard it, Coach Bryant told the following story at a Touchdown Club meeting many years before his death. * * * I had just been named the new head coach at Alabama and was off in my…

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Peter B. Vaill on coping with “permanent white water” within a competitive environment

November 8, 2012

An interview of Peter B. Vaill conducted by Kerry A. Bunker and Laura Curnutt Santana is included in Extraordinary Leadership: Addressing the Gaps in Senior Executive Development published by Jossey-Bass (2010). Here is a brief excerpt: “By ‘permanent white water,’…

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Designing products for value

November 7, 2012

Here is a brief excerpt from an article from The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company and written by Ananth Narayanan, Asutosh Padhi, and Jim Williams, in which they explain how leading companies combine insights about customers, competitors, and…

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