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 …

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 it for a couple of hours now in place of my usual “Time Warner by …

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 all about training aimed at …

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 the money quote is

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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, though, there

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While contemplating the strange mess that Hewlett-Packard’s board of directors has gotten itself into, one of my FORTUNE colleagues asked last week, “Why do companies have boards of directors, anyway?”

Why indeed? I did a little checking (starting with the strenuous act of going to SSRN and searching on “corporate board history”), and …