W. P. Carey MBA - Executive Program - Arizona State University

Learning from leaders

When Andy Grove got his PhD from the University of California , Berkeley , in 1963, he was a corporate recruiter's dream candidate. He had a number of job options, perhaps the best of which was with Bell Labs, then the Mecca of research in solid-state physics. But Grove made a different choice. Rather than head for Bell Labs, he joined Fairchild Semiconductor, a West Coast upstart, where he worked under the legendary Gordon Moore, who led the company's research operation. That was an early example of out-of-the-box thinking from Grove, who five years later left Fairchild with Moore and others to co-found Intel.

Learn about personal growth from 25 of the most influential leaders of our era. Andrew Grove is given special attention:

Grove's leadership of Intel -- marked as it has been by unconventional thinking, imagination and integrity -- contributed this month to his being named the most influential business leader of the past 25 years by Wharton and Nightly Business Report (NBR), the most watched daily business program on U.S. television.

The 25 leaders selected as most influential are these:

Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics; Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com; John Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group; Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group; Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway; James Burke, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson; Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computers; Peter Drucker, the educator and author; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft; William George, former CEO of Medtronics; Louis Gerstner, former CEO of IBM; Alan Greenspan, Chairman, U.S. Federal Reserve; Andy Grove, chairman of Intel; Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler; Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers; Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines; Peter Lynch, former manager of Fidelity's Magellan Fund; Charles Schwab, founder of Charles Schwab Inc.; Frederick Smith, CEO of Federal Express; George Soros, founder and chairman of Open Society Institute; Ted Turner, founder of CNN; Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart; Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric; Oprah Winfrey, chairman of the Harpo group of companies; and Mohammed Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank.

Illustrated history of China

Here is a beautifully illustrated timeline of China's history with maps and drawings.

The cost of college textbooks

The average cost of textbooks for an undergraduate is now just under $1000 a year . What makes college textbooks cost so much? This article explores the ways in which publishers are "bundling" products and increasing prices.

No life on Mars but plenty of bugs

Here's an interview with the person responsible for maintaining computer operations on the Mars vehicles:

In today's edition of Wired News, I interview Mars Rover mission chief software architect Glenn Reeves about the challenges of maintaining a functioning operating system on another planet -- and what it's like to live life on Martian Standard Time.

Social (virtual) networks

Orkut has started a new social network and it's by invitation only. The response has been both positive and negative -- positive in that a lot of people have signed up and negative in that a lot of people have felt it is elitist or biased or in some other way not really a fully open network.

The statistics on the ramp in traffic at Orkut versus existing social networks (Friendster, LinkedIn and Tribe) are shown here.

The web as a social institution and its influence on social patterns is only starting to emerge.

UPDATE: Here is an article in Wired on social nets and how they are not all making friends. And here is an analysis of the "many to many" networking scheme -- it's strengths and weaknesses and where Orkut may be vulnerable.

UPDATE: Orkut = roach motel? You can check in but you can't check out. Here is another take on this social web.

David Bradley

The name probably doesn't ring a bell but one of his contributions to the IBM PC will. He is the inventor of -- and wrote the code for -- the most famous combination of keys on any PC: control-alt-delete.

The engineers knew they had to design a simple way to restart the computer should it fail. Bradley wrote the code to make it work.

"I didn't know it was going to be a cultural icon," Bradley said. "I did a lot of other things than CtrlAltDelete, but I'm famous for that one."

He's retiring today (Friday) from IBM. Once on a panel with Bill Gates, he was asked if he really was the inventor of CntrlAltDelete. He claimed credit for that, but added, "I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous." Bill didn't laugh.

Outsourcing -- it's causes and cures

Much talk about the movement of "knowledge-based" jobs overseas has led some to wish for political protection -- make it illegal. Glenn Reynolds paints the fuller picture:

I read Dan Pink's cover story in this month's Wired about outsourcing. The Wired cover features an Indian woman as "the new face of the silicon age," and the piece makes clear that Americans need to be focusing more on valuing smartness and hard work. As a sidebar piece by Chris Anderson puts it, India represents a "practically infinite pool of smart, educated, English-speaking people eager to work." And behind India, there's China.

So what's going on in America? Nothing that should frighten the Indians too much. Oh, there's some talk of legislation to limit outsourcing, but that won't work -- and, if it does, will simply constitute a cure worse than the disease. Or, we could be working to make our education system more challenging and effective, encouraging our kids to work harder, and develop their intelligence.

We're certainly not doing that. In Nashville, schools have stopped posting the honor roll. In other schools, cheating is routinely winked at, to the point where a speaker on academic dishonesty reports that she was practically laughed off the stage.

The wealth that the United States has accumulated is due in large part to working hard. When being smart is something to mock and working hard is for dullards, we won't be smart enough to figure out political protections to keep anything but busy-work safe from outsourcing. As Reynolds concludes:

Part of that hard work lies in educating the next generation. It's pretty clear that we're dropping the ball in that department. Instead of worrying about outsourcing, maybe we should be worrying about that.

UPDATE: More comments on the relative merits of challenges from other countries for knowledge work:

"The United States will be a Third World country in twenty years." So intoned Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration Treasury official and supply-side economist, at a Brookings Institution briefing on January 7. Roberts makes this prediction because of white-collar job losses from the outsourcing of service sector employment to India and China. As a result, whole classes of high-wage service sector employees--from software programmers to radiologists--now find themselves in competition with highly skilled workers abroad who earn a fraction of what their U.S. counterparts make.

Read the whole article.

UPDATE: A review of Roberts' protectionist stance is provided here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here is a collection of comments on the outsourcing debate, referencing the Wired cover story, the New York Times article and web references from various sources.

Who to vote for

With so many choices, it can sometimes be confusing. To help, there is President Match. Answer the questions and it will tell you which Presidential candidate is the right one for you. An acquaintance, who thought he was for Clark, answered all the questions and found that, really, the one he wants is Kucinich; Sharpton was second. Clark came in fourth, right after Kerry. So, it really does help.

Campaign director perks

The Washington Post reported that the Dean campaign has decided to forego further advertising in this round of the primaries. There's more:

The New York Times says the campaign "has upended its advertising strategy. Dr. Dean, who last June was the first candidate to advertise, is now the only major candidate to be off the air right now, and his strategists said Wednesday night that they were in no hurry to return." Furthermore, Dean campaign officials "said they were only confident of having enough money to compete through next week."

But the kicker, sure to anger Dean contributors, is buried later in the article: Joe Trippi "forfeited a salary as a campaign manager but collected commissions -- said to be as high as 15 percent in some cases -- based on advertising buys."

Comments here question how a campaign can justify paying a commission to a manager who places buys for ads for the campaign? There are probably a lot of people who could place $40 million in ads, pick up their 15% fee ($6 million!) and lose both primaries. Do you really need to pay that high a commission to get that kind of service?

The 101 dumbest moments in business

Business 2.0 has just published its own list of the 101 dumbest moments in business for 2003. Here's the winner (there are 100 more, though, and all interesting):

In August, the board of the New York Stock Exchange decides to give CEO Dick Grasso his $139.5 million pension up front, ostensibly to save the estimated $10 million it would cost to deliver the payout at retirement. Grasso offers a succinct if not altogether satisfying explanation: "I'm blessed." When a firestorm erupts over Grasso's payday, he graciously agrees not to take another $48 million he has coming to him. Then, a week later, Grasso "resigns"—and quickly claims he was fired, which entitles him to another $58 million, including the $48 million he had promised to forgo.