IN THE EARLY 1970s a handful of former employees at IBM, then the world’s biggest computer-maker, spent weeks pulling double shifts. During the day they quizzed the workers at a nylon plant...
WHEN HARRY told me that he was leaving the company, one of the first things he said to me was that he didn’t like sentimental goodbyes. I have decided to take him...
FEW AMERICAN business tactics are as peculiar in a freewheeling capitalist society as the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. P.H. Hanes, founder of the textile mill that would eventually become HanesBrands, came up...
SHARP ATTIRE and a purposeful stride. The left-hand turn on the plane away from the cheap seats. Skipping the in-flight film to refine a presentation. Over the past two pandemic years these...
TO SAUDI ARABIA, Qatar is little more than a sore thumb sticking out into the Persian Gulf. For decades, the kingdom has looked down on its neighbour as an irritating pipsqueak, with...
“IT MAY NOT be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” said Leslie Moonves, the TV network’s then boss, of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2016. Ratings soared under Mr...
THE FAMILIAR exerts a powerful subliminal appeal. The “name-letter effect” refers to the subconscious bias that people have for the letters in their own name, and for their own initials in particular....
SURFING BETWEEN team-building exercises. Tequila shots in meetings and pot on private jets. Barefoot strolls around New York. Adam Neumann’s quirks have been familiar to readers of newspapers’ business pages since 2019,...
