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By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.
James Surowiecki -
Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.
James Surowiecki
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On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true.
James Surowiecki -
Solyndra's failure isn't a reason for the government to give up on alternative energy, any more than the failure of Pets.com during the Internet bubble means that venture capital should steer clear of tech projects.
James Surowiecki -
Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.
James Surowiecki -
If you work for Google or Apple, stock options give you a chance to share in the increasing value of the company. In the N.F.L., nothing like this happens; the players, though rich, are just working stiffs like the rest of us.
James Surowiecki -
The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.
James Surowiecki -
A general principle of good taxation is that similar jobs, and similar kinds of compensation, should be taxed the same way: otherwise, the government is effectively subsidizing some jobs over others.
James Surowiecki
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The paradox of Steve Jobs's career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers - he was famously dismissive of market research - yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.
James Surowiecki -
Flexible supply chains are great for multinationals and consumers. But they erode already thin profit margins in developing-world factories and foster a pell-mell work environment in which getting the order out the door is the only thing that matters.
James Surowiecki -
Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.
James Surowiecki -
The Xbox 360 is the best game console ever designed. It's fast and powerful - games look as good on the 360 as on high-end PCs that cost six times as much. It's easy to navigate and has lots of useful secondary features - the ability to play digital video, stream MP3s, and so on.
James Surowiecki -
A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are.
James Surowiecki -
Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.
James Surowiecki
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As technology improves, on-screen avatars look more and more like real people. When they start looking too real, though, we pull away. These almost-humans aren't quite right; they look creepy, like zombies.
James Surowiecki -
Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author's own problems with finishing the piece.
James Surowiecki -
There are certainly valid reasons for taking a company private, and it's also possible that C.E.O.s perform better when monitored by a small number of owners in a private company rather than by the dispersed and often uninterested shareholders of a public corporation.
James Surowiecki -
Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It's a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way - that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction - and still trust that they're going to come up with good answers.
James Surowiecki -
Discussions of health care in the U.S. usually focus on insurance companies, but, whatever their problems, they're not the main driver of health-care inflation: providers are.
James Surowiecki -
The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.
James Surowiecki
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What the investment community does like is short-term measures designed to boost share prices.
James Surowiecki -
A consumer-finance agency is a good thing, but it would do well to teach consumers a simple lesson: if you don't understand the deal you're making, don't make it.
James Surowiecki -
The reason advertising is governed by fear, after all, is that most agencies rely on just a few clients to bring in the lion's share of their revenues.
James Surowiecki -
The desire for reinvention seems to arise most often when companies hear the siren call of synergy and start to expand beyond their core businesses.
James Surowiecki