Sheldon Adelson is really into lists. On a visit to Fortune yesterday, he spent several minutes reeling off the (impressive) academic and other accomplishments of his two daughters–much to the embarrassment of one of them, Sivan, who was sitting next to him. Before that Adelson (the “ad” is pronounced like advertising, not lemonade) had named [...]

I had lunch yesterday (paid for, don’t you worry, by the long-suffering shareholders of my employer, Time Warner) with the new CEO of Avaya, Lou D’Ambrosio. Avaya was the dowdy stepchild of Lucent, spun off in Oct. 2000 so the glamorous parent could concentrate on “next-generation communications networks.” The Internet was changing everything, so Lucent [...]

Professor Stephen Bainbridge of the UCLA School of Law was not impressed with my essay last week on “Who needs a board of directors, anyway?” “It’s a very good question,” he wrote in his blog, ProfessorBainbridge.com. “Unfortunately, he [me, that is] offers a very bad answer.” Bainbridge’s main complaint appears to be that I attributed [...]

Nobel prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz has an interesting essay in the current Fortune about the deficiencies of gross domestic product as a measure of economic health. Lots of people have been criticizing GDP these days: Some focus on the inability of economic numbers to reflect true well-being. Others worry that our methods for measuring inflation [...]

The mouse pad pictured at left used to belong to famed trendinista Faith Popcorn, who grabbed it off her desk and handed it over to me this morning so I could read the list printed upon it of 17 trends that guide her firm‘s work. Then she told me to keep it. I’ve been using [...]

Dov Seidman, the CEO of LRN, dropped by earlier this week. He’s visited before, and I haven’t known what to make of what he’s selling. LRN started out in 1992 as a legal research network (LRN, get it?) that law firms could outsource projects to, then got into compliance training for corporations, and now is [...]

I just stumbled across this fascinating post in the food blog Chez Pim. It’s by Andy Griffin, a California organic farmer who was a pioneer in the bagged-baby-greens business that is at the heart of the FDA’s spinach crackdown. If fresh spinach is a part of your life, I’d recommend reading the whole thing, but [...]

Most of the media coverage of HP’s scandal, including my own modest effort, has gone out from the assumption that corporate leaking isn’t nearly as bad as corporate spying. Of course we journalists think that, right? We’ve never met a leak we don’t like. From the perspective of a shareholder in a publicly traded corporation, [...]