This is actually a new-for-2009 Waterford crystal ball, approximately 10 feet in diameter, weighing over 12,000 pounds, covered with 2,668 crystal triangles, and illuminated by more than 32,000 LEDs.  Happy big bad bright New Year. Actually, Dear Reader, I imagine many of you, as I, will be jus...

Actually, the formulation of that headline that I prefer these days is the famous inversion by the Nobel economist Paul Samuelson: "If you're so rich how come you're so dumb?" And yes, that brings us promptly to the Bernard Madoff scandal. Among the multitude of "we should have seen i...

"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." —Mark Twain, in a cable from London to US publishers, who had mistakenly printed his obituary. And so, for the entirety of my career, has it been the case with predictions of the demise of the billable hour.  If the best predi...

A smart friend of mine, in a conversation apropos the financial meltdown, recently wondered if people "aren't reading too many newspapers and not enough history."  He has a point. So forthwith, a little history. According to McKinsey in "Financial crisis and reform: Looking back ...

Twenty-six years ago Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published In Search of Excellence , and to some extent the genre of writing for business managers hasn't been the same since.  If for no other reason, it's worth taking a moment to revisit Peters' thoughts on the current state of the art ...

Consider a nonrandom selection of headlines from The New York Times, The Financial Times, andThe Wall Street Journal: Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk Citigroup Tries to Steady Stock Turmoil Continues in Banking Sector Citigroup: You Can't Step Into the Same Crisis Twice, Right? Citi crisis deepens...

Our texts for today come from (in inappropriate order) the New Testament, as it were, and Peter Kalis, the chairman of K&L Gates: "The metaphysical question is whether you can have bulge-bracket Wall Street firms without Wall Street," says Kalis. "The capital markets, when they re...

Sometimes there's no substitute for being there. This couuld be the introduction to a column about why technology, Web 2.0, and collaboration at a distance all add up to precisely zero threat to places like New York and London--making them, in fact, more important than ever--but I have a different r...

In the nearly five-year history of "Adam Smith, Esq.," you could have counted the number of guest columns on one finger.  As of today, make that two. The following comes from E. Leigh Dance (see immediately below), who has a strong perspective on what globalization means for our indus...

Making the rounds is a  presentation by Sequoia Capital on "startups and the economic downturn," which constitutes a sort of come-to-Jesus meeting for that storied VC firm's portfolio companies.  It tells a tale of radical gloom, with "multiple problems" in the world ec...