Business Lessons From Kindergarten

Recently, a business associate came to my office for an important meeting. During the meeting, I had to take a phone call, and while on the phone, I watched as my guest wandered around my office looking at the various photos and framed memorabilia that I have hanging on my walls. When I was done with the phone call, he pointed to my one and only diploma and laughed. read more

Warren Buffet’s Snowball

The first authorized biography of Warren Buffett seeks to explain how he’s made a lot of people, including himself, very rich over the last five decades. The first part, however, offers precious little insight.

The Snowball, the first authorized biography of Warren Buffett, has been one of the most eagerly anticipated business books of the year. Published on Monday, the book is particularly timely because of Buffett’s role in the credit crisis now roiling Wall Street.

A team of Conde Nast Portfolio.com writers, starting today with finance blogger Felix Salmon, are reviewing the book in sections over the next five days, and will be commenting on each other’s reviews. read more

Green Your Electricity

The cost of electricity is going up (both in dollars and in environmental and health impacts) and it doesn’t show any signs of doing otherwise. About half of the energy in the American grid is coal generated. We won’t bore you with what you already know: coal is a really stinky, dangerous, nasty, unsustainable, and silly way to make power. By using less energy, and greening the electricity that we do use, we can lighten our footprint immensely. The subject of electricity and its environmental impacts is a massive one and we can’t cover every corner of it here. We hope that this brief guide can offer some solid suggestions for greening your electricity and use thereof. read more

The new T-Mobile Google Phone - Android

The T-Mobile Google Phone powered by Google new ANDROID platform.

Today’s debut of the T-Mobile G1 is the first public appearance of an almost fully-baked consumer “Googlephone” — a phone based on Google’s Android operating system.

There’s just one problem: There is no Googlephone*. And that’s something Google must fix, and fast, if it wants its mobile operating system to succeed. read more

Reading for the Poolside MBA

Summer’s a great time for MBAs to catch up on some of the latest business thinking. Here are some suggestions from B-school professors

School is out, the sun is shining, and the temptation to forget about structured finance and pick up a trashy novel for beach reading is overwhelming. But those who are determined to get ahead of the MBA pack and beat out the competition for jobs in the increasingly competitive business world know that getting through an ambitious summer reading list is an assignment worth accepting.

The best thing about a summer reading list is that you can customize it to meet your interests as though you’re your own professor. Also, you can complete it at your own pace, whether you’re reading on a chaise poolside or waiting for the bus you take to your internship. And you don’t have to do it on your own. You can start with suggestions from some professors at top American business schools, who recently shared their suggested summer reading lists with BusinessWeek.com. Another good source is BusinessWeek’s list of best-selling business books. read more

Wholesalers turn to the web

As times get tough, wholesalers are turning to the web, setting up online stores to move more product and hit the end consumer directly. read more

How do different generations communicate: Boomers, X’s, and Y’s

Take a visual look into how Boomers, Gen-X, and Gen-Y communicate - and how.

Boomers had it pretty simple back in their youth. Want to connect with your friends? Write them a letter, give them a call or go and see them.
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Online Social Networking Goes Professional

Once again - the media of social networking prevails, now in a business setting. With the immeasurable success of MySpace and Facebook, it was only a matter of time before it was converted into a business concept as well. read more

Alex Bogusky + Microsoft = Dangerous Combo

Crispin+Porter completely changed the image of Apple, and returned a brand thought to have been gone in the dump. Partner Alex Bogusky now joins Microsoft to see if he can reinstill the magic that once was the Seattle superpower. read more

Start-ups in a down economy

Nobody loves a recession*. But many successful entrepreneurs say that, in retrospect, they were lucky to have launched their businesses in tough times.

Case Study No. 1: How Method Weathered the Dot-com Bust

* A recession is commonly defined as two consecutive quarters during which the country’s gross domestic product shrinks. It is too soon to say whether the economy is in a recession now.

When they look back on the early days of their start-up, Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan remember that a lot of potential investors laughed at them. The Bay Area, where they were living, was awash in Internet start-ups. Each week in 2000 brought another glitzy launch party or news that the scantest of business plans had attracted venture capital. Even office landlords were demanding equity from their dot-com tenants. Lowry and Ryan, who wanted to start a company to make — of all things — humdrum household products, were decidedly out of step with the times. “You had the sense that there was this real historical thing going on in the region, even if it was not going to end well,” says Ryan. read more