"In one corner of Manoj Bhargava’s office is a cemetery of sorts. It’s a Formica bookcase, its shelves lined with hundreds of garishly colored screw-top plastic bottles not much taller than shot glasses. Front and center is a Cadillac-red bottle of 5-Hour Energy, the two-ounce caffeine and vitamin elixir that purports to keep you alert without crashing. In eight years 5-Hour has gone from nowhere to $1 billion in retail sales. Truckers swear by it. So do the traders in Oliver Stone’s 2010 sequel to
Wall Street. So do hungover students.
It’s $3 a bottle, and it has made Bhargava a fortune."
posted by vidur
on Feb 9, 2012 -
59 comments
“Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good,” Mark Zuckerberg said recently. “They are 100 times better.”
Bull hockey, says Bill Taylor in the Harvard Business Review: great people are overrated. See also
Great People are Overrated, II and Malcolm Gladwell's 2002 take on the same theme,
The Talent Myth.
posted by escabeche
on Nov 21, 2011 -
107 comments
How
Dropbox said "No" to Steve Jobs and lived happily ever after. (So far.)
posted by Trurl
on Oct 24, 2011 -
110 comments
Lean Publishing is the act of self-publishing a book while you are writing it, evolving the book with feedback from your readers and finishing a first draft before using the traditional publishing workflow, with or without a publisher.
posted by Trurl
on Oct 13, 2011 -
20 comments
Last week Johnson & Johnson
announced that it is lowering the maximum daily dose for single-ingredient Extra Strength Tylenol from 8 to 6 pills per day (from 4,000 to 3,000 mg).
[more inside]
posted by hat_eater
on Aug 4, 2011 -
54 comments
Scott Kurtz draws and writes one of the Internet's oldest webcomics,
PvP. He launched it in 1998 and, since then, has won two Eisner Awards and a Harvey Award for his work. Scott has been a trendsetter for webcomics before, infamously (and frequently controversially) brash in defense of its business model, especially in the face of criticism from old media. Today, he announced that he will be
selling product placement in his strips, starting with an arc focused on
Magic: The Gathering. This is a webcomics first. Will it prove a boon to the financial success of artists, or a burden on the freedoms they've won? Or will it catch on at all beyond PvP?
posted by gilrain
on Jul 22, 2011 -
75 comments
The Higher Education (Debt) Bubble - "[H]igh and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it. If this sounds familiar, it probably should...
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on May 17, 2011 -
185 comments
The Surprisingly Undetestable Birth of TGI Friday's In 1965, a young Manhattanite just “looking to meet girls” added some sawdust, fake Tiffany lamps and a coat of blue blue paint to the $5000 bar that became, nearly immediately, NY's first and most popular singles bar, and eventually, the progenitor of one of the US's most popular restaurants.
posted by Plemer
on May 14, 2011 -
59 comments
Go figure: How to succeed in business by doing nothing Article about variability in business and why it is sometimes better to do nothing.
"You're a dynamic business leader. Let's say you make widgets - though you might equally make big-budget Hollywood movies.
Your widgets, or your movies, vary. Some widgets are perfect, some a tad too long. Some movies make mega-bucks at the box office, some bomb.
So what do you do? Well, you're dynamic, so you react, of course. Something must be done. "
[SLBBC]
posted by marienbad
on Apr 28, 2011 -
16 comments
How two American kids became big-time weapons traders - "Working with nothing but an Internet connection, a couple of cellphones and a steady supply of weed, the two friends — one with a few college credits, the other a high school dropout — had beaten out Fortune 500 giants like General Dynamics to score the huge arms contract. With a single deal, two stoners from Miami Beach had turned themselves into the least likely merchants of death in history." (
via; previously on
arms contractors)
posted by kliuless
on Mar 21, 2011 -
69 comments
