Big Think

Management Tips from Star Trek

Michael Fitzgerald — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:56:14 +0000

Captain Kirk, management guru? Yes, say management experts, in a clever article assessing Kirk’s management of the Enterprise. It highlights six things the typical CEO could learn from Captain Kirk: Know when to be a pal, and when to be tough. As Kirk found when he split personalities, you can’t be too nice or too tyrannical, [...]

Open Jobs = Trouble

Michael Fitzgerald — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:05:02 +0000

How can 3 million job openings mean bad news for America’s economy? Business Week argues these open jobs, in this downturn, provide “evidence of an emerging structural shift in the U.S. economy that has created serious mismatches between workers and employers.” If you look at the jobs, most of them are in services: education, healthcare, professional and [...]

Small Power

Michael Fitzgerald — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:29:39 +0000

We revere big hits and big ideas (this is Big Think, after all). Along come Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval with “The Power of Small,” a new book excerpted in Change This as The Small Revolution. Do not confuse this with E.F. Schumacher’s classic “Small Is Beautiful.” That was about people-focused economics. This book [...]

Chrysler's Creditors Take a Bath. Is It Fair?

Michael Fitzgerald — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:46:49 +0000

Should Chrysler’s workers (i.e., unsecured creditors) get put in line ahead of its bondholders? Of course not, under normal circumstances. But Chrysler represents anything but normal circumstances, says Daniel Gross, Slate’s Moneybox columnist. Gross argues that the U.S. government was right to do this, in part because investors who bought Chrysler’s debt were already dealing [...]

Are We Really "Wired to Care?"

Michael Fitzgerald — Tue, 05 May 2009 03:20:11 +0000

“Wired to Care” will inspire either murmurs of pleasure or groans of dismay from readers. At its heart, “Wired to Care” offers a management manual for those who think business cannot be run by the numbers. “Quantitative data and facts are no substitute for real-world experience and human connection,” write Dev Patnaik and his word [...]

Three Steps to Save the Economy

Michael Fitzgerald — Mon, 04 May 2009 03:32:17 +0000

If you think the U.S government has flubbed the bailout plan, you’ll like Eric Janszen, the sometime venture capitalist and entrepreneur who runs iTulip.com. Janszen spoke at the Nantucket Conference on Friday, giving a likely preview of his book “The Post-Catastrophe Economy.” If nothing else, Janszen is provocative. For starters, he thinks the U.S. government’s efforts [...]

Can Robots Save American Manufacturing?

Michael Fitzgerald — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:11:33 +0000

Rod Brooks, the robotics guru who co-founded iRobot and now runs a startup called Heartland Robotics, is speaking at the Nantucket Conference. He thinks robotics has been stymied by a basic cost problem: it costs 10 times more to integrate robots into product lines than the robot itself. That means it’s only cost-effective to use robots [...]

Chipping Away at the Myth of "Good to Great"

Michael Fitzgerald — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:16:35 +0000

Jim Collins’ famous book now stands as close to a modern management Bible as exists. But Todd Sattersten of 800CEORead looks at a series of recent takedowns on Good to Great and concludes “there is enough evidence now to force us to reconsider Good To Great as the pinnacle management book of this decade.” Sattersten [...]

Open Innovation at Nestle

Michael Fitzgerald — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:43:36 +0000

Open innovation now approaches business cliché status, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. I went today to listen to Helmut Traitler, Nestle’s vice president of innovation partnerships, a job that Nestle created just two years ago to pursue ideas from outside the company. Last year, open innovation created $200 million in new business for [...]

5 Rules for Business Twitter

Michael Fitzgerald — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 10:17:27 +0000

If your business isn’t using social media tools, now is the time, says Sharlyn Lauby in the 5 Ws of Social Media. She reminds us that social media tools such as Twitter offer businesses a valuable form of communications. If you’re mystified by Twitter, see her notes on Dell and Zappo’s. If you think the best [...]