Now that Oprah Winfrey has announced the end of the show will be 2011 already the media and advertisiers are looking to who will fill the void. Dr. Phil McGraw, Ellen DeGeneres and Dr. Mehmet Oz, are 3 names among the contenders for talk dominance. Analysts say that Ms. DeGeneres and Dr. Oz, in particular, stand to gain, because their deals with stations will come up for renewal at the same time that Ms. Winfrey intends to depart.
Who will emerge in the post-Oprah world? Read the New York Times' take on the situation.
Is Wikipedia proving an idea too good to be true? An article in the November 23rd Wall Street Journal muses on the recent troubles of a project that was once considered the epitome of freedom and innocent collaboration. Like everything else, Wikipedia has run up against that perennial source of problems, human nature. Rules, hierarchy and structure, once considered antithetical to the spirit, have multiplied to cope with entry vandalism, false postings, abuses, and misinformation. Doubts have crept in about the founding concept of 'crowdsourcing' -- the notion that wisdom can be found in aggregating multitudes of web users. Volunteer contributors have been dropping out at an alarming rate. So whither Wikipedia? And, for that matter, whither the Web?
What happens when a top dog doesn't have his day? On his blog Stanford Professor Bob Sutton discusses research into organizational behavior when high-testosterone individuals are subjugated to those with low testosterone. Some experiments suggest that when 'naturally dominating' individuals are not given high status but are kept lower down the totem pole, organizations perform less effectively. People seem to sense that something is "out of whack", and lose confidence in the group. So what are the implications for corporations who always want that top efficiency? Give their top dogs free rein?
The US won 70% of the Nobel awards this year, but the prize is a lagging indicator; Nobels are usually given to scientists at the end of their careers. Are we looking back through a time tunnel, and do these American achievements reflect the past instead of the future? An article by Fareed Zakaria Is America Losing Its Mojo in the November 23rd issue of Newsweek discusses the possibility that we are falling dangerously behind the rest of the world in innovation. For example, Zakaria claims we are far behind the rest of the world in one key resource: human capital. Our students are not measuring up -- and thus America is not producing the kind of workers needed for a knowledge-based economy. The gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is closing on many fronts, but is most evident in the high tech arena. Can we rekindle the American spirit? Or is Zakaria a new Gibbon, describing the beginning of the end?
 Ken Auletta, "America's premier media scribe", has written a new book "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.". Auletta spent 2 1/2 years working on the book, interviewing 150 former and current employees, including founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. He came to see the 11-year-old Google - which now produces two-thirds of all Internet searches in the United States and last year had revenue of nearly $22 billion - as full of brilliance and idealism, contradictions and vulnerabilities.
Read about his recent book reading held at Google headquarters in Mountain View.
Also check out this new book and other books penned by Mr. Auletta here at Jackson Library.
Guy Kawasaki on his blog cites the 19 bloggers that Inc. magazine thinks you should read. Included among them is Kawasaki's blog, but we're happy to report that GSB Alum Seth Godin's blog also made the grade. Check it out.
Thomas Friedman makes a powerful argument for rain forest management and preservation in his November 11, 2009 op-ed piece for the New York Times. Friedman claims that the amount of CO2 emitted collectively into the atmosphere by all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and each year is actually less than the carbon emissions that result every year from the chopping down and clearing of tropical forests in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo. We are losing a forest the size of New York State every year. Friedman's strategy is to make saving the rain forest more profitable than clearing it, but will a website be the only 'Amazon' our grandchildren will know?
Some of you who watched Saturday Night Live this weekend might have seen the "Really" news skit portion with Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers covering H1N1 vaccines going to Wall Street if not, here it is. Maureen Dowd from the New York Times wrote a scathing piece calling Goldman Sachs, “Goldmine Sachs” entitled Virtuous Bankers? Really!?! where she provides a short description of the SNL dialog as well as addressing Wall Street’s other misbehaviors. The Wall Street Journal reports that Goldman Sachs requested 5,400 vaccine doses, and as far as we know only received 200. One small light shone on the ethics deprived landscape that is Wall Street in that Morgan Stanley agreed to distribute its 1000 doses of the vaccine to local hospitals for distribution.
Kraft is in the throes of a hostile takeover of the very British company, Cadbury. The “takeover dance” which has been talk of for a while has finally come to pass. There is an outcry from Englishmen to keep Cadbury British. Cadbury went as far as saying that it felt the bid by Kraft was “derisory.” What is going on? It seems Kraft wants to grow its business and believes this is the way to proceed. Cadbury has been doing well for itself even surpassing expectations last quarter. The Financial Times is indicates that since Kraft has shown its hand that some Hedge Funds might be interested in jumping in to bid.
As described on his blog, Stanford Professor Bob Sutton has been leading a workshop on spurring innovation, together with Professor Hayagreeva "Huggy" Rao and others. Customer Focused Innovation is the name of the program, in which executives spend mornings reviewing cases, theories and models and afternoons applying design thinking. Among their projects is a collaboration with a local Tesla motors dealer to improve the Tesla car ownership experience. Included in Sutton's blog is a list of 21 things 'that great bosses believe and do' to lead innovation.
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