Leadership mentoring

Dance of the MBAs

Alison Overholt — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:11:37 -0400

"Faster! Faster!" A wispy, gray-haired man in black sweats and a T-shirt shouts at 24 Wharton MBA students as they run barefoot around a theater. He's tearing around, too. "Lean! Move! Don't look at the floor!" he yells. The students obey, awkwardly, a few knocking into one another, one landing in a heap.

These future managers are learning about leadership and collaboration from Jonathan Wolken, cofounder of the modern-dance troupe Pilobolus. So far, though, the Wharton kids look as if they'd be content just to survive the daylong workshop unbruised.

Can Russell Simmons Unite the Hip-Hop Community on The Web?

April Joyner — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:51:00 -0400

Recent Web 2.0 technology has enabled surfers to choose from all the news feeds, multimedia, and applications the Internet has to offer to create their own start pages. Web surfers in the urban community, however, might need help finding more specialized content -- at least, that's what Global Grind, the recently launched startpage aggregator, is betting on.

11 Facebook Applications That Were Built to Fail

Brendan Collins and Rachel King — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:45:05 -0400

1. My Celebrity Boyfriend

Power Play

Anya Kamenetz — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:15:12 -0400

Pacific Gas & Electric proudly calls itself the "greenest big utility in America." The California company has relatively low emissions, thanks to a mix of hydro and nuclear power. "We're investing in renewables like crazy," says Robert Parkhurst, PG&E's earnest, bespectacled environmental-policy manager. "We're trying to walk the talk here." But PG&E has struggled to meet a state target of 20% certified renewable energy -- wind, geothermal, solar, biomass -- by 2010; it's currently delivering just 12%.

The Success of Kayak.com

Robert Levine — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:30:58 -0400

In late December 2003, two of the men who invented the Web travel business caught up at dinner. Over nouveau American cuisine, former Travelocity CEO Terry Jones and Steve Hafner, who had just resigned as EVP of Orbitz, talked about their successes and -- as the wine flowed -- their regrets. "We congratulated each other," Hafner recalls, "but we also discussed why we didn't enjoy using our own products."

These Brands Are Made for MySpace

Anne C. Lee — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:30:42 -0400

Harley-Davidson

After the success of the Operation MySpace concert in Kuwait, featuring Jessica Simpson and the Pussycat Dolls, Harley jumped aboard to sponsor the event's home page and ongoing conversation in an effort to reach veterans.

McDonald's

"Big Mac Chant," the burger chain's pick-the-next-jingle contest on MySpace, garnered nearly 1 million page views in three weeks.

Cartier

The Most Valuable Player in Sports is ... this Doctor

Chuck Salter — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:30:20 -0400

Right By Radiohead

Tim Manners — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:49:47 -0400

It was all very cute and nice back when we marketers could kid ourselves that engaging our consumers was a simple matter of letting them create their own television commercials.

That idea of consumer engagement is looking even more vapid than it did before -- now that Radiohead has decided to put its money where its heart is and actually trust its fans to set the price of its latest record.

Use Online Networks to Find Your Star Employee

David Teten — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:47:41 -0400

Your dream employee is lurking out there. How do you find him or her? To track down those stars, recruiters are aggressively using online tools such as blogs, virtual communities, social-networking sites, and biography-analysis software. Here are some best practices in those areas:

The Amazing Race

Robert Levine — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:27:45 -0400

The Engineer

David Warren Lee
Chairman, Project Director, and Systems Engineer
Society For Sustainable Mobility
Malibu, California

David Warren, 30, works as an engineering product manager for a defense contractor by day, but in his free time leads the Society for Sustainable Mobility's Open Source Green Vehicle Project. The goal is a seven-passenger SUV that will get 100 mpg, sell for about $30,000, and, he says, have the performance of a Porsche Cayenne.

The Journal-ist: In the Lead

James Kuczmarski — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:35:11 -0500

>> Want to be a great leader? Michael Harvey, writing in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, identifies curiosity as a trait that "stimulates learning and, concurrently, increases the effectiveness of decision making and quality management in the global marketplace." Curious leaders excel at problem solving by intuitively filling gaps "between what one knows and what one wishes to know," and they're so important that Harvey suggests corporations administer curiosity exams: "Individuals should be tested on a regular basis."

¡Hola Surfers!

Ellen McGirt — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:35:09 -0500

Every marketer, pollster, and advertiser knows this much about Hispanics living in the United States: They are deeply family oriented, and their families are big. So when Alicia Morga, founder and CEO of the Hispanic-focused online-marketing firm Consorte Media, first started working with ad agencies on home-financing campaigns, she was told to use cheery images of happy, home-owning families. Problem: "The pictures of the big, brown family turned out to be the lowest-performing creative among Hispanics," Morga says with a laugh.

Office in a Cloud

Robert Scoble — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:05:22 -0500

The way we work is undergoing the biggest shift since Microsoft Office launched in 1989--and it's poised to make editing documents on your desktop as quaint as correcting mistakes with Liquid Paper. Collaborative work applications, collectively known as "office 2.0," now let you work remotely with other people in whole new ways.

Urban Outfitters

Phil Patton — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:05:22 -0500

Most weekday afternoons, you'll find Paul Ayala in his Manhattan studio, drawing furiously with a blue Magic Marker. His worktable is littered with shoe and clothing samples. From his black Converse Chucks to the bejeweled watch on his wrist--a new model he created for Ecko called the Eclipse, with the moon's phases marking the hours--he's as self-consciously stylish as you'd expect a young designer to be. And let's emphasize "young": Ayala is just 17.

Speaker For Hire

Fast Company staff — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:05:07 -0500

WHO: Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ex-Secretary of State

WHAT: International Franchise Association annual convention

WHEN: February 9-12

WHERE: Orlando, Florida

Mad Scientist

Jon Gertner — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:05:04 -0500

One afternoon this past summer, Jeong Kim took a seat at a quiet back table of a suburban New Jersey restaurant and removed a pen from his jacket pocket. Without speaking, Kim cleared away the salt and pepper shakers and brushed away some crumbs. Then he leaned forward and drew a square on the paper tablecloth. He paused. Then he drew another square behind the first and carefully transformed the diagram into a cube.

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

Clive Thompson — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:05:03 -0500

Don't get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. "Oh, God," he groans when the subject comes up. "Not them." The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994--until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà!

Blogging Business

Fast Company staff — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 20:40:45 -0500

As selected by the Fast Company team, these are the best business blogs. The most intelligent. The most interesting. The most useful.

FEEDBACK

What are your favorite blogs?
Let us know about your need to reads!

Cyber Monday: The Phantom Boom

Chris Dannen — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:08:43 -0500

Come Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, shoppers will once again wade through crowded malls to seek out sales, kicking off the holiday boom. But those of us with less temerity are creating another kind of critical mass by turning increasingly to Web shopping for the holiday hunt. Web sales are predicted to increase 21% this year according to Forrester Research, down from 24% last year. As most any e-tailer will tell you, their uptick starts right around Thanksgiving, similar to the brick-and mortar-stores'. Their uptick has recently earned a name: Cyber Monday.

Will Facebook Ever Make Money?

Ellen McGirt — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:08:30 -0500

Last month, I spent about an hour with Chamath Palihapitaya, Mark Zuckerberg's latest hire and something of a guru of targeted ads. Though we spoke before the Microsoft deal was finalized, his comments offer some insight into Facebook's plans and how online advertising is evolving. By the way, you don't want to play poker with him. Word on the street is that he's lethal.

Here are some of his comments:

Facebook's audience is in fact much more monetizable, because they're much more engaged and their experience is productized in a natural way.

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg Are Now Friends!

Ellen McGirt — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:08:29 -0500

After much wrangling, hand-wringing, and second-guessing, Facebook and Microsoft announced an expansion of their strategic advertising alliance yesterday: Microsoft will pay $240 million for 1.6 percent of the social-networking site.

Now, That's Entertainment Technology

Chris Dannen — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:08:28 -0500

With the proliferation of Web-based sharing of music, movies and TV shows, entertainment media are spiraling out of corporate control. Flustered by lackluster CD sales and fleeing artists, the Recording Industry Association of America was the first to signal its panic, suing a lone Kazaa user for almost a quarter of a million dollars. The trend the RIAA was reacting against: the proliferation of media created by, and popularized by, the users themselves.

Amazon’s Latest Coup: Thinking Small

Chris Dannen — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:08:26 -0500

So you have a Web business. It used to be that customers would visit your site, buy something, and move on. But in a Web 2.0 world, merchants are looking for ways to find revenue and move money in ever more creative and flexible ways, and until recently, they were hitting a wall.

Celebrity Blogs: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Aviva Yael — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:07:46 -0500

True confession: I ghost write a lifestyle blog for a celebrity CEO. I aim to make my boss' blog both interesting and fun, while enabling his fans to feel connected to him personally. He counts on me to promote his business by talking about his projects and ventures in a way that makes his readers feel like they're privy to his daily life. It may seem very impersonal, but in actuality, he's very hands on, just as he is with every aspect of his businesses. In fact, he uses his blog to build his brand and communicate with his readers (and competitors) in an informal and direct setting.

2006: A Year of Great Minds and Fascinating Business Ideas

Kevin Ohannessian — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:25:34 -0500