by Bruce | March 16, 2020 | Articles, Ineffable, Just Plain Interesting, Leadership
At times, and now is emphatically one, when America is challenged we seem to take forever to get up off our haunches and begin the process of trying to wrest back control of the chaos and turn back the threat. Our response is spastic, uncoordinated, at cross...
by Bruce | January 30, 2019 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Ineffable, Just Plain Interesting, Leadership, Strategy
My title for today steals literally from Ronald Coase’s legendary 1937 paper of the same name, which gained Coase the Nobel in Economics in 1991. The paper, barely over a dozen pages long, asks the question, childlike in its simplicity, “why do firms...
by Bruce | March 9, 2018 | Articles, Finance, Ineffable, Just Plain Interesting
John Adams notably wrote that “facts are stubborn things.” Words, however, can be fluid, flexible, and subject at times to arbitrary diktat. This last sense was famously expressed in Alice in Wonderland “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather...
by Bruce | July 4, 2017 | About the Site, Adam Smith Himself, Articles, Just Plain Interesting
“You have a republic, if you can keep it.”—reliably attributed to Benjamin Franklin, at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. With that as our text in mind for this parlous and yet inspiring Independence Day celebration, two threads tying our...
by Bruce | October 17, 2016 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Just Plain Interesting, Strategy
In connection with an ongoing research/whitepaper project, further about which affiant sayeth not, I had occasion to look at the Original AmLaw 50 from 1985. Here are the first three columns: Rank, firm, and gross revenue: Aside from the historic time warp we...
by Bruce | October 12, 2016 | Articles, Just Plain Interesting
From the redoubtable David Warsh of Economic Principals: When the Nobel Prizes were established, in 1901, the Nobel Foundation for perhaps a decade sought to spirit laureates into Stockholm in order that they should be available when their recognition was announced....