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Showing posts from December, 2012

Book Review: What Matters Now by Gary Hamel

Interview of Eric Schmidt by Gary Hamel at the MLab dinner tonight. Google's Marissa Mayer and Hal Varian also joined the open dialog about Google's culture and management style, from chaos to arrogance. The video just went up on YouTube. It's quite entertaining. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Cover of The Future of Management My list of must-read business writers continues to expand.   Gary Hamel , however, author of What Matters Now , with the very long subtitle of How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation , has been on the list for quite some time.   Continuing his thesis on the need for a new approach to management introduced in his prior book The Future of Management , Hamel calls for a complete rethinking of how enterprises are run. Fundamental to his recommendation is that the practice of management is ossified in a command and control system that is now generations old and needs to be replaced with somethi

Tragedy at Sandy Hook

I’m sad. I had some other ideas I wanted to write about today, but they no longer seem relevant to anything.   As a father and grandfather, I cannot imagine what those families are going through. It is incomprehensible. My Twitter feed is replete with comments on gun control.   While I’m a gun owner, I would support a ban on automatics.   But I think there is something deeper and more difficult going on.   Guns have always been plentiful in the U.S.   In the neighborhood I grew up in, every family I knew well owned guns.   Most of the fathers were WWII vets.   They would go small game hunting, duck hunting, and occasionally deer hunting.   There were no incidents of mass slaughter.   No one took one of their father’s guns and murdered fellow students. What’s changed?   Why does this happen now, but didn’t happen in the fifties and sixties?   One answer would be everything.   Single parents were rare in my working-class neighborhood, but common now.   Class started with

Congresswoman Schwartz Response to JOBS Act Inquiry

Official House photo of Allyson Schwartz (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I wrote my Congresswoman, the Honorable Allyson Schwartz, asking her to encourage the SEC to issue the guidelines on crowdsourcing capital, as directed by Congress in the Jumpstart Our Business Act ("Jobs" Act.  Here is her response: As I work to address the needs and concerns of American families and businesses across the 13th Congressional District, it is important that I hear your views. I want you to know that I always take your views into consideration as I work to make the right decisions to revitalize our economy, invest in our future and meet our obligations. I appreciate you taking the time to contact my office and I want to share my views regarding our economy. We have a lot of work to do to strengthen our economy. To succeed, we must restore consumer and investor confidence and ensure American businesses can compete in a global economy. Economic competitiveness can be achie