Business Explained by Stever

 

 Is it good business to screw people? [5:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’d like to share with you a LinkedIn exchange I had on the topic of whether Being Nice is a good business strategy.

Have you seen this story? Our Boston leadership (and I use the term loosely) is once again promoting terror, fear, and ineptitude, in one happy package. An MIT student had a “bomb hoax” on her shirt.
“Hoax” implies she was trying to pull one over on the police. No, she had a piece of wearable electronics [...]

An article in the New York Times says that fewer finance jocks are attending business school. All I can say is: Good! In fact, it’s good for everyone.
The Wall Street jockies whose only real interest is in making a buck can go make their money unimpeded by anything like the knowledge of what a company [...]

Today is September 11, 2007. There are plenty of people out today, celebrating the firefighters, rescure workers, and World Trade Center denizens who lost their life in the terrorist attack of 9/11. My friend from business school, Andy Kates, was one of those.
The destruction of the World Trade Center was a shocking event, made all [...]

I just had this exchange of answer/email/response on LinkedIn on the topic of: should you be nice?
The original question:

Is there power in being nice, with people in general or as a management tool?I’m reading the new book “The Power of Nice” because it was sent to me by Bzz Marketing. It is quite interesting and [...]

I just saw The 11th Hour, Leonardo DiCaprio’s new film about the state of the planet and what it will take for us to clean things up. It’s the first such movie I’ve seen that actually presents the start of a vision of the kind of world we’ll need to create.
One conspicuously unanswered question is: [...]

I was just reading an article in the Boston Globe about the trade deficit hitting a 4-month low when I stumbled across these two paragraphs:
In a second report, inflation at the wholesale level jumped sharply in July, rising by 0.6 percent, far above the 0.1 percent increase analysts had been expecting. The bigger-than-expected jump reflected [...]

I just read an article in the New York Times documenting a teacher resigning when a student who didn’t remotely pass a class was bumped to a ‘pass’ to meet graduation rates for the school. While I can understand why incompetent school administrators might rely on false passes to keep their jobs intact, this is [...]

A friend invited me to yet another social networking site. Now I’m on MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Doostang, Gather, and probably a few others I can’t remember off the top of my head.
So when is enough enough, already? Simply filling out all those online profiles could be a full-time job. I’m beseiged with invitations, and I’m [...]

Wow. Walking through the airport, I saw a sign:
Shell Oil says: When Mother Nature doesn’t back down, we have experts up to her challenge.
Think about that framing! Shudder. That’s the framing of extinction. Mother Nature, dear Shell Oil, is what gives us life. Food. Clothes. Even *gasp* oil.
Maybe we are, indeed, at war [...]