In 1983, General Motors unveiled “a new kind of car company.” Saturn was GM’s five billion dollar gamble in innovation. They lost their wager. This year, Saturn is being shut down. An accurate assessment of human nature would have predicted this. Almost 100 percent of the time, when a company tries to innovate inside their…
Bill Russell has few friends. By design. Oh, the retired Boston Celtics star is friendly, very friendly. In fact, he’s one of the friendliest people on the planet. You’d never know he hardly has any friends—unless you try to “friend” him. That’s what Frank Deford tried to do in 1969, and he never forgot how…
Bill Russell has few friends. By design. Oh, the retired Boston Celtics star is friendly, very friendly. In fact, he’s one of the friendliest people on the planet. You’d never know he hardly has any friends—unless you try to “friend” him. That’s what Frank Deford tried to do in 1969, and he never forgot how…
Before the rebuilding begins, there are lessons to learn. The human and emotional toll of the earthquake in Haiti is almost unfathomable. The images flashed on the television can’t in any way depict the gritty mix of heartache and heroism, faith and fatalism that has marked this tragedy. In the coming days and weeks, a…
In the 1960s, five provocative books, including The Death and Life of Great American Cities, braved stiff headwinds. They challenged core assumptions of city planners and business leaders. Forty years later, those winds are shifting. Today, another group of books are challenging the core assumptions of the contemporary American church. Braving stiff headwinds, it remains…
Students in Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield’s courses receive two sets of grades. The first set is public and what a student feels entitled to. The second set is a reality check—the private grade a student actually earned. Reality checks for Americans are in the mail this week—IRS tax returns. They remind us that culture carries…
by John Seel, Ph.D. I grew up in South Korea, the son of medical missionaries who served there for 35 years. I arrived as an infant on January 1, 1954. The Korean War had ended; nonetheless we traveled to Jeonju, the home of Jesus Hospital, by U.S. military escort across a war-ravaged countryside. Today, South…
by Steven Garber Have you seen the cartoon where the professor has written out an incredibly complex mathematical equation on the two whiteboards in the front of the classroom? Numbers and letters, plus and minus and multiplication and addition signs throughout? At the very bottom of the right hand corner there is an “equals” sign,…
Those who talk about “making culture” can sound like the chattering classes. So much yak for so little yield. The problem is fuzzy thinking about what causes cultural change. Aristotle once described what causes a table to come into existence. If he was correct about causes, most of the talk about “culture” is merely making…
The first time I received a Christmas bonus, I was elated. I expected it the next year. That’s human nature. But it’s more than that. It’s the nature of financial incentives to morph motivation. That’s a challenge for companies with a purpose beyond profitability and personal gain. But it’s not insurmountable. My favorite auto shop…