One of the greatest moments of Michael Jordan’s career was the flu game, game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals against Utah. Jordan had been throwing up all day, and could barely get out of bed. But he somehow willed himself to score 38 points and beat the Jazz. (You can watch the highlights on YouTube.)
Anyway, I’m no Michael Jordan. I’ve got …
…others around me must fail.
Admit it: that’s how many of us feel. And I’m not just talking to you, Barack and Hillary.
You know that feeling when you land that highly sought project—but then you learn your colleague nabbed one that’s even better? Or when you publish an important article—just as your long-struggling college buddy …
Here are the operating margins (operating profits divided by revenue) of Moody’s Corp. Inc. over the past five years:
2007 50%
2006 62%
2005 54%
2004 55%
2003 53%
Anybody know of any other business with margins like that? I checked a couple of what I thought were likely suspects, Google and Qualcomm, and they were nowhere near.
So sayeth no less an authority than the New York Post. In an article yesterday titled “Miss-Leading: The Truth About Gals’ Serial Fibbing,” the tabloid begins:
Deceit, thy name is woman.
What Hamlet actually said was “Frailty, thy name is woman.” But whatever. I quibble not. What brought on this slanderous accusation? Ah: no less a …
In the most conclusive sign yet that the apocalypse is upon us, the lead story in today’s New York Times is about municipal bond ratings. Apparently a few state treasurers are getting mad about the fact that their bonds are graded differently than corporate bonds–Moody’s, for example, gives five different grades for munis that all would …
March 3 is Girls Day in Japan. All across my home country, families have set up elaborate doll sets featuring a princess and her prince decked out in ornate kimono. The one in my house cost my grandmother a stupid amount of money, but its hand-crafted figurines of royalty are like crack for my princess-addicted three-year-old.
I’m not …
My new column is in the issue of Time with the large-eared-man on the cover and online here. It begins:
Over the past few months, we have heard banker after Wall Streeter after mortgage lender declare that market conditions are the worst since they got into the business. Some go even further. “The worst market crisis in 60 years,”
…
Sorry for the anemic posting this week. I seem to have mostly recovered from the horrible disease I had a couple days ago, although I’ve been warned by lots of people (including Curious Capitalist Jr.) that it will probably recur. And now I’m in Southern California for a family thing (the funeral of a beloved grandmother-in-law, to be …
I don’t do book reviews because I don’t read books. This has not stopped the publicity department of every major publisher from continuing to send me workplace, business and management–related books. I collect them in a bin, and when the bin fills up, I drag it down the hall to the dump (not really: all over the TIME offices, there are …
So I’m having breakfast this morning with Haiyan Wang and Anil K. Gupta, the wife-and-husband team behind the Maryland-based China India Institute (not under any circumstances to be confused with the India China Institute). They’re giving me their–quite compelling–spiel about just how amazingly unprecedentedly transformative the rise …
Last week, I penned an article for Time.com titled, “Does Obama Have an Asian Problem?” The story predicted the senator from Illinois would handily win Hawaii’s primaries, which were to occur later that day. He did. But it also sought to explore why other states with large Asian populations saw their Asian votes go overwhelmingly to his …
A mere three years ago, the nation’s two great government-created, privately owned, politically well-connected buyers of home mortgages, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were in disrepute. They’d both been buffeted by massive accounting scandals. Their CEOs had resigned in disgrace. Congress was talking about significantly reining in their …
