About 100 years or so ago, a few years after the MBA program was founded, Professor Melvin T. Copeland started teaching capital-M Marketing at Harvard Business School. Thanks to his early work, marketing became its own domain in business education. …

I believe facebook reduces reach of businesses’ organic posts — let’s call it commercial speech — when they don’t value the speech or the speaker. Maybe there is explicit engagement-to-quantity scoring by speaker, who knows? But I am sure whatever definition they have for “value” is very thoughtful and the…

I don’t have kids. But I do like some of the ones I meet and, of course, appreciate the importance of children conceptually. A long time ago, I developed a coping strategy for being around other people’s kids: Fun Experimental Games. It’s interesting and entertaining for everyone to play these…

Okay, let’s do an experiment. I want you to take a piece of paper and write down the following: “I’m having a hard time with _______. I need help to ______ so that I can _______.” How did that feel? It might have felt good, or it might have felt…

Per capita output of humans on Earth was pretty disappointing for pretty much all of human history. Check out this graph — you need to see it. This graph was made using estimates created by Professor Brad DeLong, an economist at University of California at Berkeley. He estimated the GDP…

Take a look up at this graph. It’s the retail price of a yard of cotton cloth in the 18th and 19th centuries. See how it falls? Well, really, “collapse” is probably a better word for it. That downward slope is the Industrial Revolution. The machines and the mills of…

From 2006 to 2014, I taught at Stanford University. This is the story of one of the activities I used in the classroom. The activity is called Factory vs. Studio. …

Human beings have a knack for observing, forming judgments, and taking action. When you state it like this it seems pretty linear and rational, whether you’re talking about individuals or people working in teams. Cognitive behavior theory says automatic thoughts color and distort our observations, our judgments, and our actions. …

I want to tell you about Frank Drake, radio astronomer. In 1961, Frank invited some of his colleagues to a weekend getaway to talk about aliens. They did this at the National Radio Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. Among the group of 10 scientists who attended this getaway were…