Category: Business

  • Neologisms

    The “Keeping Our Word” campaign from Eagle Asset Management, now offline, looked suspiciously (and coincidentally, I’m sure) like my “Neologisms” ads for Deloitte & Touche of nine years ago. I have to admit I’m a sucker for invented words, so I admire Eagle’s approach which consists of these new coinages: perfonomy — the addition of…

  • Top 5 books of 2010

    Below are the five books I enjoyed most, or found to be most persuasive or positively influential, out of the few dozen I managed to read this year. These were not necessarily published in 2010 — they are included only if I actually read them during the course of the year. Three economics/investing books, one…

  • Fault Lines : Raghuram G. Rajan

    Another take on the economic crisis: somewhat dry and academic but quite thorough. The most illuminating idea was a refinement of the distorted compensation incentives that poison Wall Street. Rajan’s idea is an employee’s performance bonus held in long-term escrow to ensure it does not blow up a too-big-to-fail bank employer within a year or…

  • Three ways to address innovation in business

    Innovation is the big imperative of the next economy, many say. But so many things currently endemic to the American way of business impede the American way of innovation: Me-tooism. Every smartphone is playing catchup to the iPhone, which was innovative and creative. Any touch-based smartphone that follows, no matter how cool and incrementally beneficial,…