Features

Departments

Overreaching
By Melissa Master
Under the imperative "grow or die," many businesses expand heedlessly into new territory with products only tangentially connected to the company's original offering. Why do some attempts succeed and others fail so spectacularly?
Are Business Schools Anti-Business?

• Yes: The Wrong Lessons
  By Marianne M. Jennings
  The anti-capitalistic mindset and moral relativism of modern academia have wreaked considerable harm on the teaching of business.
• No: What Business Needs
  By Anthony F. Buono
  Working hand-in-hand with the business community, today's B-schools are successfully meeting the new demands of the Information Age.

Whatever Happened to . . .
By A.J. Vogl
J. Peterman Co. went out of business in 1999, but John Peterman will always resemble the dashing, duster-wearing character from his inimitable mail-order clothing catalogs. Here, he discusses the bankruptcy, his new book, and his plans for the future.
Sign Language
By Tony Spaeth
Our annual review of the year's best (and some less-than-stellar) branding efforts shows that simplicity and consistency still work.
"You Are Simply Average"
By Peter Flynn
Annual performance reviews are designed to reward excellence and weed out poor performers. But for the vast majority of employees, ranked in the middle as merely "average," the exercise is often needlessly demoralizing.
Doing Whatever It Takes
Workers from all walks of life, from professional photocopiers to headhunters to CEOs, speak out about the realities-and absurdities-of their jobs.
Half Our Decisions Are Wrong
By Paul C. Nutt
But there are ways you get more things right more often, and here, an expert gets down to cases.

Openers
By A.J. Vogl
Contrarians
Fast Forward
By Randall Poe and Carol Lee Courter
How politics was taken over by marketing; whether "brain" equals intelligence; why ignoring e-mail will get you the cold shoulder; and more.
Executive Intelligence
By John Wareham
Our veteran speaker shares his time-tested formula for holding an audience captivated.
Dispatches from the Front
By John Guaspari
The question, "How are we doing?" eventually becomes selfish. Your customers want to tell you how they're doing.
Face to Face
By Tom Brown
A refugee from big business explains how he found the true meaning of "empowerment" in a small franchise of his own.
Conference Board Research
By Charles Peck and Henry M. Silvert
We provide the information that everyone secretly craves-the salaries of their peers.
In Review
By Edgar R. Fiedler
Hernando de Soto's prescription for curing the Third World's ills sounds sensible, but is it too simplistic?
Manager's Tool Kit
By Joe Fodor
Why salespeople need to stop talking; how to drag your reluctant employees through change; the proper care and feeding of techies; and more.
Sightings
By Vadim Liberman
All Tired Out.

Soundings

Soundings con't

Poor, Misled, and Mutinous
By Adrian Furnham
The Way We Were
By Simone de Beauvoir
What I Learned in Business School
By Warren E. Buffett

Fuzzy Math
By George Shaffner
Questioning Authority: Guy Kawasaki
By Melissa Master
And more from Ray Bradbury, Craig Lambert, Leonardo da Vinci, David H. Freedman, Mark Kingwell, Mark H. McCormack, Brian Hackett, and John MacIntyre