In the movie Trading Places the Eddie Murphy character catches on quickly to the concept of stock broking, likening it to bookies who make money off both ends. We’re led to believe by the popular press and a bunch of self-aggrandizing books that the highest value on Wall Street is creating value. Unh hunh. Then how come stock brokers make a fortune whether your money goes up or down? (Do they teach THAT in business school, that the best way to make a fortune is to collect fees off both sides?)
Why doesn’t someone do for the eyes what headphones do for the ears. In today’s Wall Street Journal there’s a story about people frustrated with surfing the Web on small handheld devices who want something bigger but not so big as a laptop, which is “inconvenient to whip out in a restaurant.”
So, why not some sort of magnifier or something you can put on your eyes or some sort of virtualization to make the smaller screen you can carry in your jeans pocket seem bigger when you look at it? And some sort of correlation for the hands, so you can move your fingers a normal amount for mousing and not have it swipe the cursor off the screen? Or, perhaps some sort of foldable screen you can flip out to make much bigger than it was in your pocket?
Why are so many professors in business school — training people to be capitalist captains of friggin’ industry — Lefties (as one prominent b-school prof confided to me).
How come we don’t see “Nudity as a Marketing Tool” as a course in every biz school catalog? When I was an exchange student in France, I remember seeing a TV ad with a naked woman who walked across the screen, and stood next to a TV that was supposed to be the must-have device of the day. Sex sells, and for some reason nudity seems to, too. (But would it in a culture where clothes are not the norm?) It’s not clear that seeing a naked woman would increase my desire for an electronic box, but someone clearly thought so.
People in various states of undress sell everything from TV to underwear to social causes. Why should getting undressed get so much attention? It just does. So nudity is a powerful weapon. Does anyone teach it, though?
Why am I never around when all these naked people further their cause by taking their clothes off? (photo from JJ’s Dirt, which has more coverage)
Spoke with an alum of the Harvard Business School today who, for reasons I won’t reveal to protect his identity, knows hundreds if not thousands of other alumni who’ve graduated throughout the past years and decades. He confided to me that it’s something of a running joke at the exalted institution that the finance portion of HBS is not all that good, and a lot of folks — at least those who don’t go in already strongly oriented toward finance — leave without a strong understanding of how to, say, manage like a CFO. “Some people derive a certain strength from that,” he said, by which I guess he meant that if you don’t know something to well, you can then hire someone who does and manage them. You don’t, in other words, get too bogged down in the pesky spreadsheet details and can concentrate on the big-think strategy stuff.
Wharton, he said, was by contrast known as a finance powerhouse.
Brad Adgate, the senior vice president of research for Horizon Media, which buys ad time for clients like Geico and Ace Hardware. (NY Times)
That’s just too coincidental.
Do waiters in rotating restaurants get confused and have troubling finding their tables?
… about things that confuse me about business.
