Entries tagged Business
Estee Lauder, left, helps a customer apply lipstick in 1966. Credit: Bill Sauro/World Journal Tribune / Wikimedia Commons
Even with hindsight being 20/20, betting on a woman founding an entirely new industry in the throes of the Great Depression seems pretty unlikely. But, as historian and Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn tells us, it’s the story of Estee Lauder. Read more...
H.J. Heinz was an ingenious businessman with an obsessive - and odd- personality, says Joshua Kendall. Here, a selection from a 1930 Heinz recipe book. Credit: alsis35 / Flickr Creative Commons
Ever notice that many famous innovators seem a bit…prickly? Joshua Kendall, author of "America's Obsessives," says visionaries - like H.J. Heinz and Melvil Dewey - often exhibit the kind of obsessive behavior that leads to great ideas, but troublesome personal lives. Read more...
What if automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence are bearing down on us at a faster rate than we ever anticipated? Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, authors of "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies," say technology is rapidly reshaping our economy. Read more...
Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine and author of "Cool Tools," says that robots are getting better and better at doing human jobs – and that's a good thing. Read more...
One journalist argues that Americans haven't cornered the market on creativity. And that China is hot on our heels. Should we be concerned? Read more...
In our continuing series on American competitiveness - and whether America will still be the place where great innovation occurs - we’ve looked at transportation with Former Governor Ed Rendell and education with Professor Paul Peterson and former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn. Today we ask: how desirable are American workers? And is that desirability threatened by gridlock in Washington? Read more...
Time for a little experiment. Open a new tab in your browser and type in the URL “Relentless.com.” It’ll take you to a surprising and probably familiar place: the homepage of Amazon.com. As Brad Stone, author of the new and controversial book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” notes, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos considered “relentless” a fair characterization of the company he wanted to build. But, truth be told, it’s also a fair characterization of the man behind the company.
If you’ve ever been to a foreign country, you know that one of the most terrifying parts of travel is being surrounded by a language you don’t understand. Peter Lee, head of Microsoft Research, might be able to change all that (and drastically reduce the amount of time you spend furrowing your brows and squinting at that French menu). Lee and his colleagues have created technology that can translate from language to language in real time, and he discusses it with us, along with other with up-and-coming technology that could change our lives.
Let’s play a game — identify your dominant hand. Quickly snap your fingers five times with that hand. Now, take the forefinger on your dominant hand and draw a capital “E” on your forehead. Daniel Pink — recently named to the Strategic Advisory Council of outplacement services company RiseSmart — calls this game “The E Test.” It’s been used since the 1980s to measure what social scientists call “perspective-taking.” The results can give us insight into your worldview — do you see things strictly from your own perspective, or do you take the views of others into account?
In the summer of 2012, the San Francisco tech start-up Gild offered a job to 26-year-old Jade Dominguez. Dominguez didn’t have a college degree — and he hadn’t even applied for a job with the company. Why did Gild make him an offer? The company harnesses big data to look for the Internet’s most qualified workers, rather than relying on resumes, outdated credentials, or a human resources department. As it turns out, big data thought Dominguez was the best man for the job.
