Recently in Business Category

The letter above arrived in my mailbox this afternoon from AIG's Private Client Group... sometimes you just can't make this stuff up.

Ouch. Less than 12 hours before the vultures got their ads up on Facebook targeting people in the Lehman network? I'm getting a number of ads like this today, presumably because my FB account has that network on its list. On the Internet there's no "respectful pause"... the harpies just descend instantly.

You too can make money off the green energy revolution. Talk to our in-house biogas consultant on how you can covert inexpensive dog food into the kind of raw energy that will drive the masses across the entire living room.

Marissa and I watched "A Crude Awakening" last night via Apple's iTunes movie store. (It's quickly becoming apparent to me that downloading is so far superior to the NetFlix model it's not even funny. I'd rather watch what's available via download than pick from the broader NetFlix catalog but have to wait 2 days for it to arrive, and there's never an inventory issue.)

The movie is definitely worth watching, regardless of your view on the "peak oil" theory and/or climate change. Frankly it doesn't even touch on the environmental / "Inconvenient Truth" component of fossil fuel usage - it simply examines the history of production peaking in the US and other previous "oil center" nations and the reasons why the current leading producers have heavy incentives to overstate their reserves (and may be doing so by 100% or more of their actual remaining reserves.) It also touches on the immense economic implications this would have for the markets and world economies, both developed and developing -- the global economy is massively dependend on the availalability of cheap energy, especially for the transportation of raw and finished goods worldwide. There would also be huge implications for newer cities in the US and abroad that developed around the "car economy" - think anywhere but the East Coast and maybe Chicago, basically.

One of the best quotes: "...will my grandchildren know what it's like to fly in a airplane?"

Scott Berkun, who spent nine years as a manager at Microsoft, has authored How to Manage Smart People, a short (18 screen) ChangeThis manifesto on managing what I'd term "knowledge workers." It's a good piece (and a decent plug for his book) but it ignores one of the biggest issues in running these kinds of teams: not just keeping them moving, but keeping them headed in a direction that's aligned with their larger company.