Labor Day Thoughts

This post is mostly for my students (and myself)  since the unyieldingess of the academic calendar means we are in class on labor day.
I know as a kid growing up with two professional, salaried parents, I had no concept of labor day aside from that three day weekend.  I wonder how many of my students [...]

Ethics Pledge at Harvard BS

A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Immorality – NYTimes.com
What happened to making money?
I should write more, but a few issues come to mind.  First, it is a student-led program to take an ethics pledge.  Maybe this is a furhter data point of a generational value shift from Gen Xers to Millenials.  Second, [...]

Network Liabilities- Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk

The Reckoning – Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk – Series – NYTimes.com
But many Citigroup insiders say the bank’s risk managers never investigated deeply enough. Because of longstanding ties that clouded their judgment, the very people charged with overseeing deal makers eager to increase short-term earnings — and executives’ multimillion-dollar bonuses — failed to [...]

Research ideas for Six Degrees Students

Research Ideas for My Students
Hello folks. This is by no means a comprehensive set of resources. It more reflects sources that seemed to be of interest to two or more of you AND that I thought might not jump out at you as pertinent. It is a mix of search terms, blogs, alternative media, as [...]

The Reckoning – Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt, and Risk – Series – NYTimes.com

The Reckoning – Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt, and Risk – Series – NYTimes.com
In loosening the capital rules, which are supposed to provide a buffer in turbulent times, the agency also decided to rely on the firms’ own computer models for determining the riskiness of investments, essentially outsourcing the job of [...]

Business Optimists Rediscover Society!

A somewhat structured web surf about organizational change lead me to this site about the book/project called:
Megacommunities.
Which includes this amusing graphic.

I think that web od dense relations in the middle also has an older name: society.

ikea as a malevolent force for Scandinavian hate-mongering?

The good folks at orgtheory.net cite some research showing that Ikea’s naming of products is not as random as meets the eye of the non-Scandinavian.
nonrandomness that i can’t explain « orgtheory.net
I swore off Ikea after we reached a certain income threshold.  I’d been burned by too many of those lock down bolts-on-the-end-of-screws.

These jokers run the world?

I found this article under the NYT’s most emailed (or blogged) articles.  I don’t follow the twists and turns of the software business very carefully, and it is easy to beat up on Microsoft.  like shooting a barnside.
The basics seems to be that Microsoft tried to weasel around the hardware/software incompatibility of its new Vista [...]

Map of Social Networking Sites around The World (from Le Monde)

A nice person at socnet forwarded this map of SNS sites around the world. My French is quel horrible but it seems that a quarter of all activity is North America. WE can see that Orkut still has its lock in in Brazil which drives Latin America. I had not hear of [...]

Superbowl and Internet Advertising

A writer from the local paper, The Daily Item, emailed my department asking for background on something about superbowl advertisers doing more with the internet.
Here is what I gave her back. It will be fun to see what gets used (if anything.)
“The mingling of the new kid on the block- Internet advertising- with the [...]