Author of The Revolutionary Paul Revere
The book business isn’t doing too well in America right now. Sales are down. Returns are up. And foot traffic in bookstores is in double-digit decline compared to a year ago.
But that’s not the case everywhere. From its lofty seat in the lap of America’s publishing culture, the New York Times recently reported that things [...]
To succeed in business you need to “meet the needs of consumers,” right? It’s so hackneyed it must be true. It’s so true it must be wrong.
To get what I mean, see how this strikes you. It’s from the jacket copy of Paul Nunes and Brian Johnson’s book Mass Affluence: Seven New Rules of Marketing [...]
Yesterday the stock market surged. The Dow shot up 380 points, the Nasdaq nearly 90. But while I was rifling through my bedside drawers for some Dramamine, I heard this: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to keep the federal coffers open for additional stimulus packages. I got nauseous for a whole different reason. Didn’t we [...]
What’s the connection between political campaigns and megachurches? As this post explains, the secret to building a successful megachurch is in evangelizing people inside cultural subsets rather than imploring people to venture outside of their subset. Political machines are putting the same strategy to use. Here’s the underlying cultural dynamic at play:
Neighbors witnessing to neighbors [...]
I make books. I don’t make shoes. But if it would help me make better books, then maybe I should learn what goes into making a pair of shoes. The division of labor allows specialists to focus on their strengths in the marketplace. The idea is as good and useful today as it was when [...]
“Calvinism is evidently connected with the commercial vocation,” writes Luigi Barzini in The Europeans. “It is not clear to an Italian [like the author], however, whether Calvinists, driven by their stern religious code, become the best merchants, or whether merchants become Calvinists because Calvinism is a superior guide for the successful conduct of business.”
It turns [...]
Despite their obvious differences, Das Kapital and The Wealth of Nations share at least one similarity: Nobody reads them. In the case of Karl Marx, this is no tragedy. Thanks to the colorful antics of history (many of them sticky and sanguinary), anyone can see that the bewhiskered dreamer was full of crap.
Not so with Adam [...]
