Harvey Wallbanger

With a reported 6.1 job seekers for every job opening, perhaps this is a good time to talk about hiring. Can I use that word? So many workplaces use the word "selection" now instead, perhaps to promote a sense of team membership and help us forget that for the most part we are wage-laborers working at the behest of owners who will drop us the moment our services appear unprofitable. You hire a jitney driver, after all, but you select a mate. It's part and parcel of…… More »

I'm thinking we may soon turn a corner in the long battle against a pernicious affliction. No, I'm not talking about terrorism or unemployment or H1N1. I'm talking about PowerPoint. Microsoft estimated a few years ago, according to Hilari Weinstein, that 30 million PowerPoint presentations are inflicted on unsuspecting and largely undeserving Americans every day. One might be forgiven for assuming this means, more precisely, every business day, until one visits…… More »

Hyper-glib purveyor of management gobbledygook Gary Hamel lifts our hopes when he quips at the Wall Street Journal blog: "I don't know if I'll write another book." From your mouth to God's ear, Gary.He goes on to kill the joy, however, by offering his Cliff's Notes explanation of how a business can "outrun change." It's what we've come to expect from the man who has mastered the art of stringing together breezy advice ("deconstruct your orthodoxies") and fawning…… More »

Little advances in free-market entrepreneurship among universities always make my heart go pitter-patter. It's like seeing a man sling off his leg braces at a church revival and start jitterbugging down the aisle to the collection plate. I don't doubt the process is much different, in fact -- some university provost or president attends a management seminar or reads a business book, has an epiphany about how people might actually -- just maybe, who woulda thunk it…… More »

Trump Entertainment Resorts has filed for bankruptcy a third time, after missing a December interest payment due bond holders, and just ahead of action by creditors seeking to put the company into involuntary bankruptcy. CEO Donald Trump has resigned, framing the issue not as incompetent management that made his company one of the worst performers in Atlantic City, but rather the fact that his board won't let him buy it. I suppose it would have been a sweet deal if…… More »

Check out Marvin Olasky's interview with Charles Murray, who has written a book arguing that too many kids go to college. An excerpt: "Upper-middle-class parents, when it comes to shopping for education for their children, act like drugged-up pop stars on Rodeo Drive. They buy by brand name, they don't check the quality of the product, they pay outrageous premiums, and they don't bother to check later to see if the product was actually delivered." Can you imagine…… More »

New regulations around the testing and sale of children's toys take effect this week, with predictable confusion. Thrift shop owners and small manufacturers are hollering that the testing costs will put them out of business, mini-bike makers and others are lobbying for exemptions, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued guidelines that, so far as I can tell, fail to answer a simple question like: "Do all children's products require testing?" What's…… More »

Following up on my earlier post about the self-serving spin generated by the Peanut Corporation of America, the company at the center of investigation into widespread salmonella contamination, The New York Times reports that not only did PCA switch testing companies because it didn't like how its previous tester was finding too many instances of contamination, it actually shipped product before getting test results back. "Uh-oh," is the quote attributed to one of…… More »

From The Wall Street Journal: management book faves of CEOs like Novartis's Daniel Vasella and Snap-On's Nicholas Pinchuk. Thankfully, none of them lists Who Moved My Cheese? Perhaps the most astute observation comes from Progress Energy CEO Bill Johnson, who writes: ". . . most mass market business books are of little practical value." Johnson, like other CEOs surveyed, is old-school, a Drucker fan. What's hilarious is that the author responsible for some of the…… More »

"As an industry," explain the authors of a new report on college spending, "higher education still has not made the transition from cost accounting to cost accountability." According to the healthily data-obsessed Delta Project, while universities have enacted double-digit tuition increases in recent years, the bulk of this additional revenue did not go to student instruction. Instead the funds were largely diverted to research, non-instructional student "services"…… More »

While plenty of news media attention has been paid to Attorney General nominee Eric Holder's affinity for criminals who aren't CEOs, what worries business leaders is his authorship in the Clinton Justice Department of the infamous "Holder Memo." The memo encourages companies to withdraw legal support from employees accused by the federal government of crimes, lest they be considered "uncooperative" and face further punitive measures from Uncle Sam themselves. If…… More »

While most university endowments took a hit in 2008, the richest managed to eke out a positive return on the year. Their secret? A blend of alternative investments like private equity M&A funds, real estate, oil and gas, and even distressed debt, combined with a relatively smaller investment in domestic equities. The Commonfund Institute reveals that other universities tried to play the alternatives game as well, but invested far more in a bucket of…… More »

Football is bad for your health. I'm not talking about those of us who will watch the Superbowl with one hand in a bag of chips and the other clutching a beer. I mean the people we'll be watching, many of whose bodies will sustain the equivalent of a car wreck this coming Sunday -- on top of the many concussions and breaks they've already experienced this season. This is nothing new, of course, but results from a recently released (and not coincidentally timed)…… More »

Several news agencies report that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating, inquiring, reviewing, and/or -- my favorite -- "probing" Apple's recent disclosures about the health of its messianic CEO, Steve Jobs. It's not that they "have seen evidence of wrongdoing," an anonymous source explained to Bloomberg. They're just, you know, looking into it.  … More »

Heartland Payment Systems, which processes payments for -- depending on which story you read, 175,000 or 250,000 small businesses across the U.S., has discovered that hackers have been using an embedded program to extract customer credit and debit card numbers for months, making this potentially the largest such heist in American history, potentially topping 100 million numbers. Heartland characterizes its months-long security lapse as "an unfortunate incident." … More »