Tag: General

Large scale philanthropy, as practised by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, is a business of economic significance rather than clarity.

If Venice were owned by the Disney Corporation, Venice would not be in peril. The city is threatened by crumbling infrastructure and rising sea levels, and by inexorable growth in the number of visitors. Gates that let the tourists in pay for gates that keep the water out.

In the last year, two successful books - Stephen Levitt’s Freakonomics and Tim Harford’s Undercover Economist - have attempted to bring Marshall’s conception of economics as the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life to the dinner table. Levitt and Harford are undeniably opinionated, but they are not boring: whether they are wrong you must decide for yourself. What you will find are sufficient everyday topics of conversation to captivate a future mother-in-law and turn the tables on a loquacious cab driver.

In Competing for the Future, CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel suggested that companies should adapt a strategy concerned with ‘creating stretch goals that challenge employees to accomplish the seemingly impossible’. But hindsight is a harsh taskmaster and most of the companies paraded by P&H for their foresight, have since underperformed.

Perhaps the most important single event in modern world history is that in the late 18th century economic growth took off in Western Europe and not in south-east China, despite the apparent similarity of technological and economic development and natural resource availability in the two regions.

Modern technology and modern economic organisation have broken the link between what is tasty and what it is good for us to eat, and have made it possible, for the first time in history, for everyone to eat too much. So, good luck with your new year's resolutions!

As people make their New Year predictions, they rely on naive extrapolation: it is always safer to predict the past and present rather than the future.

That fundamental ideas in applied mathematics would be developed in a brewery sounds sufficiently improbable, but the story is true and intriguing. The statistical technique most often used to study events of low probability was discovered by a Polish mathematician and an employee of the Guinness brewery.

If you look through the books on my shelves, you can pick out the Serious Business Books right away. Titles are usually no more than three words long, and embossed in large capital letters on the cover. They are not vacuous, like the lighter form of management literature, but generally, they are just pretentious and badly written

Peter Drucker’s The Concept of the Corporation, and Alfred Sloan’s My Years at General Motors are probably the two most influential management texts ever written. The two had nothing in common but acute intelligence and deep interest in business.