Selecting Your Firm’s Next CEO

The longer I’m a student of our industry, the more firms we observe outperforming and underperforming, and the more clients we engage with (several recently) on the issue of leadership succession planning, the more firmly I believe that leadership matters....

Adam Smith on the Colonists’ Victory

Adam Smith was living in Edinburgh in October 1777 when a distraught friend brought news of the surrender of British General Burgoyne at Saratoga, exclaiming in the deepest distress that the British Empire was ruined. “There is much ruin in a nation,”...

The Fatal Shore

Nearly 20 years ago Robert Hughes published The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, still perhaps the definitive historical treatise on Australia’s founding from the continent’s discovery by the West to Britain’s decision to...

The 2016 Economics Nobel

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....