You have 100 marbles – 50 of them are black and 50 of them are white. You also have 2 brown paper bags.  You can distribute the marbles however you’d like between the two brown paper bags. After you put all the marbles in the bags, you will close your eyes and I will hold [...]

I hate zero sum games (situations where my gain is dependent on the loss of someone else). A good example of a zero sum game is poker, where every dollar you win is a dollar that someone else has lost. It’s simply inefficient. As a society I believe we should strive to create cultural conventions [...]

Two weeks back at the IAB networks and exchanges conference in New York City, Doug Weaver used his keynote address to attack complexity as it relates to online ads. He flatly challenged the notion that online advertising needs to be complex, but rather postulated that we, the industry, purposely make it complicated because it makes [...]

There was an article published by Atlantic Magazine back in August 2008 entitled “Is Google Making us Stupid?” (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/) The article, in short, ponders the side effects of the information age which allows us to find facts easily and quickly, shortening the time it takes to research. The fear is that we’re not only shortening [...]

Growing up, I attended a very liberal K-12 school. We called our teachers by their first names, we did not receive letter grades until high school, and on particularly nice days many teachers would opt to hold their classes outside. It was a nice place to go to school. Among the many wonderful memories of [...]

Like many other things in the world that seem efficient, the internet has it’s fair share of fads. One such fad got kicked off back in 2005, when every website started requiring a log in and password. Even the most mundane of purchases, for instance a TV cable I purchased from Tigerdirect for $3, required [...]

Sitting in the barber chair this weekend in my hometown of Baltimore, I was chatting with the woman who has cut my hair since I was in high school – she also happens to be the co-owner of the hair salon. Over the years, it has been very interesting to see how she has developed [...]

Flipping through channels last weekend I happened across the original Superman Movie (the one released in 1978 starring Christopher Reeve). The scene in the movie was of a bustling newsroom for a fictitious newspaper. As Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) prepared a news story, the camera followed the newspaper’s authoritarian editor as he stormed around the [...]

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about the financial bubble/bust of 2008. Most authors I’ve read agree that one of the major forces that led to the meltdown was the creation and sale of exotic financial instruments that were very hard, or in some cases, impossible to price. Similarly, reflecting back on the [...]

Whenever we hear a great business success story, whether it is in the news media or in a business case study, the conclusion is usually that success of the business was due to the people working there and their innovative practices. I remember reading about Nike in school – and the cases kept going back [...]